Staff/Senior Software Engineer

Every computing era has a dominant interface. PCs made computing personal, smartphones made it mobile, and AI agents will make it ambient. Era is building the orchestration layer that powers intelligence across the next generation of physical devices, from headphones to home objects to wearables we haven't imagined yet. We just raised our seed and are shipping our first partner product in Q2 2026.

---

The Role

You'll be the engineering anchor of Era: the person who sets the standard for how we build, ship, and scale. We're a small, polyglot team running TypeScript, Python, and Swift across a Kubernetes-native platform that orchestrates real-time AI across physical devices. We also build with 50+ custom AI coding agents that let us ship at a pace that rivals teams 10x our size, and we need someone who can raise the bar on what we ship and how we ship it.

This isn't a "manage from a distance" role. You'll be deep in architecture decisions, deep in code across multiple services, and deep in making sure what we ship holds up as we scale from our first 10,000-device deployment to hundreds of thousands. You'll work directly with our CTO to translate product vision into engineering execution, and you'll be the person our engineers come to when they're stuck on something hard.

What You'll Do

• Own engineering quality and velocity - code review culture, CI/CD pipelines, GitOps deployment practices, and incident response across our entire service fleet
• Architect for scale. Design systems that grow from day-one partner launches to 100k+ DAU without rewrites, across our API layer, real-time voice pipeline, and multi-provider intelligence gateway
• Be a force multiplier. Unblock engineers across a polyglot stack (TypeScript, Python, Swift), make fast technical calls in ambiguous situations, and keep us shipping on cadence
• Own the platform backbone - our Kubernetes infrastructure, ingress routing, authentication stack, relational and time-series databases, and analytics pipeline
• Drive partner integration. Own the software stack relationship with hardware partners during device launches, ensuring our APIs, SDKs, and real-time voice pipeline perform flawlessly at the edge
• Level up the team. Mentor engineers while staying hands-on; set architectural patterns that make the codebase better every week

What We're Looking For

• You've shipped cloud-hosted software at real scale and know the pain of growing from 0 to 100k+ DAU
• Deep experience across at least two of - TypeScript backend services, Python services, mobile (Swift/Kotlin), and willingness to work across all three
• Production Kubernetes experience. You've operated production clusters, debugged pod scheduling, managed rolling deployments, and thought about cost
• Familiarity with real-time systems - WebRTC, WebSocket, audio streaming, or low-latency API design
• Experience designing and evolving data models in PostgreSQL and choosing the right storage for the job (relational, time-series, vector, cache)
• You've made DevOps an art form, and set up engineering processes (code review, deployment pipelines, on-call) that made teams faster without adding bureaucracy
• You've been the technical anchor of a high-performing small team - the person who makes the hardest calls and ships the hardest things

Nice to Have

• Experience building with LLMs and/or agentic systems in production - multi-model routing, prompt engineering, agent orchestration, tool-calling systems
• Real-time conversational AI infrastructure experience (LiveKit, ElevenLabs, or similar)
• Hardware/device integration - BLE protocols, audio codecs, companion app development
• Identity/auth platform experience (Ory, Auth0, or equivalent)
• GitOps and IaC fluency - ArgoCD, Terraform, Kustomize

You at Era

We're at the very beginning of something massive. The moment when AI breaks free from screens and becomes ambient. The defining of the relationships future generations will have with their personal devices. You'll have more architectural influence here than at any company ten times our size. You'll work alongside AI coding agents that handle implementation while you focus on the decisions that matter. You'll build the systems that power intelligence across an entirely new category of physical devices but real objects in the real world that think, listen, and respond.

We've raised $10M+ from Topology, Betaworks, Abstract, BoxGroup, Collab, and Mozilla Ventures, along with founding members of the original iPhone team and the co-founder of Flickr. Our first Era-powered partner product launches in Q2 2026.

NYC, SF, or remote. We have teams in SF and Australia and are building out our NYC presence. Competitive salary, healthcare, and meaningful equity.