Backend Engineer

AI is changing how the world communicates and LILT is leading that transformation.

Were on a mission to make the worlds information accessible to everyone regardless of the language they speak. We use cutting-edge AI machine translation and human-in-the-loop expertise to translate content faster more accurately and more cost-effectively without compromising on brand voice or quality.

At LILT we empower our teammates with leading tools global collaboration and growth opportunities to do their best work. Our company virtuesWork together win together; Find a way or make one; Dance in the customers shoes; Quicker than they expect; Quality is Job 1guide everything we do. We are trusted by Intel Corporation Canva the United States Department of Defense the United States Air Force ASICS and hundreds of global Enterprises. Backed by Sequoia Intel Capital and Redpoint were building a category-defining company in a $50B global translation market being redefined by AI.

Lilts Converse product delivers real-time multi-party translation for high-stakes conversations from offline device-based deployments in the field to live meetings on enterprise collaboration platforms. Were expanding Converse to support any number of participants speaking any combination of languages joining from a growing set of form factors with live translation delivered N-way directly on the meeting stage and cleared interpreters reviewing only the segments that need a human eye. You will build and operate the backend services that make this work: per-participant audio ingestion real-time diarization and translation orchestration and the routing logic that gets a flagged segment in front of the right interpreter and broadcasts their correction back out in real time. This is a ground-floor opportunity to help build a brand-new product surface on a team whose existing products serve some of the worlds largest global brands.

As a Backend Engineer on the Create team youll work closely with senior engineers and Product to build the services powering this Converse expansion the real-time translation pipeline and the meeting-platform integration taking well-scoped services and features from design through production with support and code review from more senior teammates. Youll help define clean API contracts with the frontend/interpreter-workbench engineers contribute to the event-driven correction and broadcast system and grow into owning larger pieces of the backend architecture as the product and team scale.

Location & eligibility: This position requires US citizenship and residence in the United States. Preferred locations are Washington D.C.; Boston MA; and Indianapolis IN.

• Build and maintain backend services for the real-time translation pipeline: audio ingestion diarization hookups streaming ASR/MT orchestration and result fan-out to every configured meeting language

• Implement the event-driven routing logic that flags low-confidence segments and routes them to the correct on-call interpreter by language

• Build APIs and services backing the bot/agent participant and meeting side panel that deliver translation into the host meeting platform with guidance from senior engineers

• Contribute to the interpreter correction and broadcast system ensuring corrections are isolated to the correct language and broadcast to all participants in real time

• Write and maintain automated tests (unit integration e2e) and contribute to CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions) for new backend services

• Instrument services for observability logging metrics tracing to support debugging of latency-sensitive multi-party sessions

• Partner with frontend/fullstack engineers on the Create team to define clean API contracts between backend services and the live meeting UI and interpreter workbench

• Participate in on-call rotation and help triage production issues as the product moves toward GA

• Help generate post-meeting assets: diarized transcripts exportable formats (TXT/WebVTT/JSON) and per-line verification metadata

• 25 years of professional backend software engineering experience ideally including production systems that handle real-time or streaming data

• Experience building REST API endpoints as well as streaming services with WebSockets gRPC message queues or comparable low-latency/event-driven patterns

• Solid experience with Java Python or a comparable backend language/ecosystem and the ability to work across more than one when needed

• Experience building and consuming REST/GraphQL APIs including authentication patterns (OAuth API keys/tokens service accounts)

• Comfort with relational/NoSQL data modeling for session state transcripts and configuration data

• Solid grasp of testing and delivery practices: CI/CD and automated integration/e2e tests

• Ability to take a well-scoped ticket or spec and ship it with minimal oversight while communicating blockers and timeline risk early

• US citizenship and residence in the United States

• Experience with speech/audio pipelines: diarization streaming ASR or audio stream handling

• Experience integrating with third-party platform APIs SDKs or webhooks (Slack Zoom or similar collaboration platforms)

• Familiarity with localization/TMS workflows: XLIFF Translation Memory MT vs. human translation pipelines

• Experience with event-driven/pub-sub architectures (Kafka Pub/Sub or similar)

• Enough frontend/React exposure to reason about API contracts with a real-time stateful UI

• Hands-on Microsoft Teams app or bot development specifically (Teams Toolkit Bot Framework Azure Communication Services Microsoft Graph)

• Experience working on 0-to-1 products within a larger established company

• Interest or coursework in NLP/ML systems

• Experience with observability tooling (e.g. Datadog) in production latency-sensitive systems

Our founders Spence and John met at Google working on Google Translate. As researchers at Stanford and Berkeley they both worked on language technology to make information accessible to everyone. While together at Google they were amazed to learn that Google Translate wasnt used for enterprise products and services inside the quality just wasnt there. So they set out to build something better. LILT was born.

LILT has been a machine learning company since its founding in 2015. At the time machine translation didnt meet the quality standard for enterprise translations so LILT assembled a cutting-edge research team tasked with closing that gap. While meeting customer demand for translation services LILT has prioritized investments in Large Language Models human-in-the-loop systems and now agentic AI.

With AI innovation accelerating and enterprise demand growing the next phase of LILTs journey is just beginning.

What sets our platform apart:

• Brand-aware AI that learns your voice tone and terminology to ensure every translation is accurate and consistent

• Agentic AI workflows that automate the entire translation process from content ingestion to quality review to publishing

• 100 native integrations with systems like Adobe Experience Manager Webflow Salesforce GitHub and Google Drive to simplify content translation

• Human-in-the-loop reviews via our global network of professional linguists for high-impact content that requires expert review

• Featured in The Software Reports Top 100 Software Companies!

• LILT makes it onto the Inc. 5000 List.

• LILTs continues to be an intellectual powerhouse holding numerous patents that help power the most efficient and sophisticated AI and language models in the industry.

• Check out all our news on our website.

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LILT is an equal opportunity employer. We extend equal opportunity to all individuals without regard to an individuals race religion color national origin ancestry sex sexual orientation gender identity age physical or mental disability medical condition genetic characteristics veteran or marital status pregnancy or any other classification protected by applicable local state or federal laws. We are committed to the principles of fair employment and the elimination of all discriminatory practices.

Required Experience:

IC