Staff Software Engineer

TITLE: Staff Software Engineer 

REPORTING TO: CTO

LOCATION: Marina del Rey, CA – OR – Williamsburg, NY (onsite M - F)

Who Is Flip?

Flip builds AI voice agents that handle millions of real customer conversations for some of the biggest brands, healthcare providers, and transportation companies in the world. When you call a company and the AI actually solves your problem — tracks the order, processes the return, refills the prescription — that’s us.

We’re a low-ego team. We don’t need the limelight or the stardom — we care about solving really hard problems, fast. And here’s the part worth stopping on: outside the frontier labs, almost nobody is running AI in production at this scale. We are — millions and millions of live phone calls, handled by an engineering team a fraction of the size you’d expect. Very few teams our size serve this volume, and the reason is simple: we hold a very high bar for development.

How we think

From day one, we’ve operated on first principles, and the first principle is the customer. If you have strong conviction that something delivers real business value for your customer, it shouldn’t die in red tape or committee. You ship it — fast and often — because the customer is what actually matters. That’s why there’s a direct line from your keyboard to production here. We didn’t remove the committee to move fast for its own sake; we removed it because conviction plus customer obsession doesn’t need a permission slip.

Agentic development has changed the way we work — we’re not shy about that. What it hasn’t changed is the necessity of experience, especially at the production level. You can ship faster than ever now; that doesn’t negate experience. Speed without judgment is how you break things millions of people depend on. That’s why this posting asks for senior and staff engineers: we’re hiring builders whose experience makes the new speed safe.

Our view is simple: let builders build. We care a lot less about stack experience or corporate pedigree than most companies — and a lot more about whether you’ve looked past the noise and want to build product you’re genuinely proud of. Tools change monthly now. The instinct to build doesn’t.

We keep the team lean on purpose — a high bar, real support, real resources — because that’s where builders truly express themselves. The most common thing we hear from engineers after joining Flip is some version of “I could never have done this at my last company”.

Deep industry expertise matched with ruthless execution creates wonderful work. That’s the whole formula.

What you’ll build

We’re serving an orchestrated system of agents answering millions of contacts daily and now also expanding into other modalities like chat. Pulling that off requires elite engineering paired with incredible DevOps — voice is unforgiving: it’s real-time, there are no retries or page refreshes, and the customer is literally on the line.

The work breaks into three lanes:

• Vertical engineering — building the agents themselves: complex multi-step customer workflows and deep integrations into the contact center and the industries we serve — order systems, healthcare workflows, logistics. This is where “mostly works” isn’t shippable.
• Platform engineering — the orchestration layer every agent runs on: routing, state, tool use, and the primitives that let vertical teams ship fast without reinventing the engine.
• Inference & DevOps — we host our own models; low-latency serving at production scale is a core competency here, not a vendor line item. Plus the telephony, observability, and deployment infrastructure that keeps millions of live calls healthy.

And the range here is real. Our engineers do everything from sitting face-to-face with customers to going deep on complex backend systems — you really get to pick where you fit. We don’t slot you into one of these on day one. There’s probably a place for you — we’ll find it together, and it’ll probably change as we grow.

What we look for

We intentionally wrote this as one role for senior and staff engineers, because we believe builders love to build — and how they build varies. Some want the flexibility of working alone and joining forces when it counts; some do their best work in a small pod. We don’t prescribe it. What we do hold as a core principle: we are always raising the bar on each other. As we grow, our best builders often end up with two or three engineers building behind them — if that’s a direction you want, it’s here. And if you’d rather stay a pure builder, that raises the bar too.

• • Real production experience. You’ve built and owned systems where failure had consequences. We don’t count years — we look at what you’ve shipped and what you learned shipping it.
  • Judgment that survives contact with production. Agentic development is how we work — but what we’re actually hiring is your experience: knowing what to ship, what to slow down on, and what never to ship at all.
  • Low ego, high execution. You own outcomes, not tickets. You’d rather ship the thing than present the plan for the thing.
  • Customer obsession. You want to be close to the problem — sometimes literally in the room — and you measure yourself by what the customer got.

More About Us

• We're international, spanning the US, UK, and Canada.
• We’ve raised +$30M to date including our recent $20M Series A - backed by Ridge, Next Coast, ScOp, Bullpen Capital, Data Point and Forum Ventures, as well as founders & executives from Amazon Alexa, Ada, Attentive and Simon Data.
• Our tech stack includes Python, MongoDB, AWS, Twilio, Datadog, Snowflake, and Omni.
• Comprehensive healthcare and unlimited vacation, including a mandatory half week for everyone over July 4, and a full week off at the end of the year.
• In the office 5 days/week, we collaborate in real time on the desk.