{"id":3066187,"url":"https://alion.io/job/smallest-ai-software-engineer-systems-and-reliablity","title":"Software Engineer - Systems and Reliablity","company":{"id":178074,"name":"Smallest AI","domain":"smallest.ai","url":"https://alion.io/company/smallest-ai","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":null},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":null,"employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Bengaluru, India"],"countries":["IN"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"ClickHouse","optional":false},{"name":"DNS","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"PostgreSQL","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"RabbitMQ","optional":false},{"name":"Redis","optional":false},{"name":"SLI/SLO/SLA","optional":false},{"name":"Speech Recognition","optional":false},{"name":"Terraform","optional":false},{"name":"Text-to-Speech","optional":false},{"name":"TypeScript","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-22T06:39:18Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-22","last_verified_at":"2026-10-26T11:51:57Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":4,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":4},"description":"Software Engineer - Systems & Reliability\nSmallest.ai| Bangalore\nAbout The Role\nOwn a service or a part of our product from design through production. You’ll write the code, validate its behaviour, deploy it and keep it reliable for the customers who depend on it.\nTesting, deployment and operations are part of engineering ownership here. You’ll work with the team, but you won’t hand off responsibility when your code is merged.\nOur systems power real-time voice, where an extra 100 milliseconds can change how a conversation feels. Behind that experience are GPU inference workloads for text-to-speech and speech recognition across AWS regions, alongside multi-tenant APIs, concurrency controls, billing and webhooks.\nWe work with Python, TypeScript and Go on Kubernetes in AWS, supported by Redis, MongoDB-compatible stores, Postgres, ClickHouse, RabbitMQ and Temporal. Familiarity helps; understanding the mechanisms underneath matters more.\nWhat you’ll own\nDefine success before building. Establish measurable service-level objectives for customer-facing latency, availability and correctness.\n\nWrite maintainable code. Build systems another engineer can understand, debug and operate without depending on you being available.\n\nTest beyond the happy path. Use unit, integration, load and fault-injection testing to validate behaviour under realistic conditions. Explain your coverage and its limitations in review.\n\nShip safely. Own CI, deployments, rollbacks, schema migrations and infrastructure changes. When your work requires a Terraform change, you own that too.\n\nOperate what you build. Create useful dashboards, actionable alerts and runbooks. Participate in on-call, incident response and postmortems.\n\nStay close to customer impact. When calls drop or requests fail, investigate directly, communicate clearly and drive the issue to resolution.\n\nImprove the system around the problem. Turn recurring incidents and manual debugging into better controls, automation and tooling.\n\nThe challenges you’ll help solve\nOur product works, and we’re strengthening the reliability practices that support its next stage of growth.\nDefine SLOs for services that do not yet have clear reliability targets.\n\nReplace misleading health signals with monitoring that reflects whether customers can complete their tasks.\n\nImprove logging, health checks and alerting so failures are easier to detect and diagnose.\n\nMake testing and operational readiness a consistent part of delivery.\n\nAddress existing reliability gaps alongside new product development.\n\nYou’ll fix problems you didn’t introduce and make decisions with incomplete information. You’ll also be expected to balance delivery speed with production readiness: surface risks early, propose practical trade-offs and follow through on commitments.\nWhat we look for\nStrong engineering fundamentals and the ability to apply them to unfamiliar problems. We assess these directly through technical discussion and practical reasoning.\nYou should be comfortable explaining and reasoning about:\nProcesses and operating systems: Process creation, signals, file descriptors, namespaces, cgroups, PID 1 behaviour and CPU throttling.\n\nMemory: Virtual memory, page cache, available memory, swap, cgroup memory limits, out-of-memory behaviour and stalls that occur despite low CPU utilisation.\n\nFiles and storage: Inodes, durability and fsync, disk-usage discrepancies, atomic rename, IOPS and throughput.\n\nNetworking: TCP states, TIME_WAIT, connection and read timeouts, Nagle’s algorithm, delayed acknowledgements, DNS, TLS, NAT and the trade-offs of UDP for real-time media.\n\nConcurrency and distributed systems: Race conditions, locks, idempotency, at-least-once delivery, retries, backoff, jitter, backpressure, clocks and partial failures.\n\nLanguage runtimes: Event loops, blocking operations, garbage collection, the Python GIL, memory leaks and algorithmic costs at production scale.\n\nData systems: Indexes, query plans, transaction isolation, row and column stores, and replication lag.\n\nReliability: SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, latency percentiles, why percentiles cannot simply be averaged, and alerting on customer-visible symptoms.\n\nWe also value clear writing, the patience to read unfamiliar code and the habit of measuring before drawing conclusions.\nWe evaluate demonstrated ability rather than years of experience, previous titles, employers, degrees, colleges, certifications or the number of frameworks on your résumé.\nHow we work\nBe honest about what you know. “I don’t know” is useful when followed by a clear approach to finding out.\n\nShare hypotheses early. Make your reasoning visible, invite scrutiny and update your view when the evidence changes.\n\nTake responsibility and improve the mechanism. Our postmortems focus on contributing causes and concrete changes that prevent recurrence.\n\nStart with the customer’s experience. A healthy pod does not mean a successful call. If the caller hears silence, we investigate it as a failure.\n\nUse evidence. Reach for traces, packet captures, profilers, query plans and load tests to understand what is happening.\n\nChallenge ideas respectfully. Question decisions-including those made by founders-with clear reasoning and evidence.\n\nAutomate repeated work. When a problem keeps returning, build a better way to detect, diagnose or resolve it.\n\nMove with urgency. Make decisions at the right level, act on reversible steps and communicate blockers early. Use meetings when they help resolve a decision.\n\nHold yourself to the standard you expect from others. Give direct, constructive feedback and receive it with the same openness.\n\nWhat to expect\nThis is a hands-on role with substantial accountability. It includes on-call responsibilities, occasional incidents outside regular hours, customer escalations and debugging across systems you may not have built.\nYou’ll do well here if you enjoy understanding how systems work, acting quickly and staying with a problem until it is resolved.\nThis role may not suit you if you prefer narrowly defined implementation tasks, consider your responsibility complete at merge, or expect testing and production operations to sit entirely with another team.\nWhy joinSmallest.ai\nBuild systems where engineering decisions are audible in the customer experience. You’ll work across real-time voice, GPU inference and distributed infrastructure, with the opportunity to improve both the product and how we build and operate it.\nYour impact will show up in faster responses, fewer failed calls, safer releases and systems the whole team can trust.","description_format":"text","description_chars":6587,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Machine Learning","Speech & Audio AI"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-22T08:04:14Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":86,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.86,"p_room":1,"age_days":3,"expected_fill_days":30,"reasons":["conf:2","win:early"],"computed_at":"2026-10-26T05:57:25Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/smallest-ai-software-engineer-systems-and-reliablity","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/smallest-ai-software-engineer-systems-and-reliablity.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-26T16:23:10Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":21819,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-27T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":178074},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=178074"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fsmallest-ai-software-engineer-systems-and-reliablity"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fsmallest-ai-software-engineer-systems-and-reliablity"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fsmallest-ai-software-engineer-systems-and-reliablity"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/smallest-ai-software-engineer-systems-and-reliablity\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fsmallest-ai-software-engineer-systems-and-reliablity"}]}