Lilt's 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. We're 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 world's largest global brands.

As a Backend Engineer on the Create team, you'll 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. You'll 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.

What You'll Do

• 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

What We're Looking For

Required

• 2–5 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 Node.js/TypeScript, 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

Strong Plus

• 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

Bonus

• 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 Tech

What sets our platform apart:

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

LILT in the News

• Featured in The Software Report’s Top 100 Software Companies!