The mandate: Own the technical direction of Retell's core platform. Architecture decisions, complex initiatives end to end, and the performance, scalability, and reliability bottlenecks that come with 650% growth. Staff-level IC scope, hands-on, partnering directly with engineering, product, and leadership. The JD is unusually direct about what it isn't: "This is not a 'ticket taker' role. You'll define problems, design solutions, and ship." Use that line in outreach — it's the single best signal to a staff engineer who's currently spending their week in planning meetings. What You'll Own
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Design and evolution of core platform and systems architecture
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Complex technical initiatives end to end, concept through production
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High-leverage decisions balancing speed, reliability, and scale
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The technical bar — design reviews, mentoring, hands-on leadership
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Translation of business needs into robust technical solutions, partnering with product
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Performance, scalability, and reliability bottleneck identification and resolution
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Engineering best practices as the team and platform scale Requirements Hard gates:
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9+ years building and operating production systems. Highest experience bar of any Retell req.
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Has operated at Staff or Principal scope, title official or not
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Has built or scaled platforms used by real customers at meaningful volume. Not internal tooling, not greenfield that never shipped.
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Strong systems design with clear tradeoff reasoning
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Still hands-on. The JD says so and the loop enforces it — a live practical coding round and a Tools & Automation round.
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On-site in Redwood City (relocation covered) Profile:
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Moves fast but cares about correctness, reliability, and maintainability
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Comfortable owning ambiguous problems and defining the path
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Enjoys writing code, reviewing designs, and unblocking people — in that combination Strong bonuses (JD-named):
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Distributed systems
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Voice AI — rare and the most directly relevant
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Real-time systems — WebRTC, WebSockets, SIP, streaming, media pipelines
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APIs at scale — developer-facing surfaces with real consumers
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Infra and platform work — the core of the req
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Developer-facing products Also strong: telephony (Twilio, Vonage, Telnyx, SignalWire, carrier-side), incident and reliability leadership, and prior experience at a company that went through the same $10M→$100M scaling wall. Location and visa:
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On-site, Redwood City. 100% relocation provided.
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Sponsorship: Yes — H-1B, TN, L-1, E-3, F-1 (OPT/CPT), and O-1 Anti-patterns
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Architects who stopped coding. The most common failure mode at this level and the loop kills it in round 4.
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Engineering managers looking to return to IC without recent hands-on depth
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Staff engineers whose scope was influence and documents at a large company with no shipped system behind it
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Anyone who needs process, planning cycles, or a defined roadmap — the JD explicitly rejects this
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Big-company staff engineers who've only operated inside a mature platform with dedicated infra, SRE, and tooling teams
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Candidates who want to manage. This is IC.
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Remote requirements Who Will Thrive Here
Someone who's been the person a company turned to when the architecture couldn't take the next order of magnitude — and who fixed it by writing code, not by writing a doc. They've made a call that turned out to be right and can explain why they made it. At 50 people with very little process drag, their decisions visibly shape the company, which is precisely what a good staff engineer at a big company is starved of.