Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This senior engineering role sits in a core SaaS infrastructure domain where product value is inseparable from platform reliability. Telephony and real time media are differentiators for many subscription products, and the listing signals work at the intersection of backend services, network variability, and user experience. The remit spans PSTN and WebRTC boundaries, low latency media pipelines, and the operational realities of keeping voice quality consistent at large scale.
For a long term SaaS career, the strongest signal here is end to end ownership of production systems: designing APIs and libraries, validating capacity with load and failover testing, and closing the loop through observability and incident follow ups. Experience with safe releases on Kubernetes and Terraform backed infrastructure translates directly to modern SaaS platform work, while the emphasis on data driven decisions and experimentation maps to how mature SaaS teams prioritize reliability improvements.
This role fits engineers who prefer deep systems work over surface feature delivery, and who enjoy turning broad epics into concrete designs while mentoring others. It also suits someone comfortable balancing KTLO with roadmap progress, and who wants to build domain expertise in real time communications without needing a prior telephony background.
The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.
Job Description
Your role
As a Sr. Software Engineer on the Tel Core team, you are the steward of our media engine’s evolution. You will bridge the gap between high-level product goals and technical execution, ensuring our telephony stack remains resilient as we scale. You’ll mentor peers and shape the long-term roadmap while fostering a culture of engineering excellence. Your success is defined by the seamless, high-quality audio experience of millions of users.
This position reports to an Engineering Manager in the Telephony Core team and has the opportunity to be based in either Vancouver or Kitchener, Canada locations
We don’t mind if you come from a different engineering background or haven’t worked in real-time media before. Just be excited to learn, to contribute to the team, and to build a fast, reliable, elegant product that delights our customers.
What you’ll do
- Maintain and modernize the real-time services that run on the Telephony Engines. Architect backend libraries and APIs to integrate with the broader Telephony Platform.
- Build and optimize low-latency media pipelines for voice and video—tuning codecs, RTP flows, and congestion-control behavior to deliver consistently clear conversations over unreliable networks.
- Investigate and resolve complex production issues across PSTN, WebRTC, and carrier boundaries using Telephony Engine logs, PCAPs, observability tools, and data-driven experimentation.
- Run load, failover, and regression tests on Telephony Engines and backend services to validate scalability, resilience, and capacity limits
- Partner with Tel Cloud, Tel Edge, Calling, and AI teams to design end-to-end call flows and integrations
- Participate in on-call and release rotations, owning Terraform- and GKE-backed rollouts, monitoring health, and driving follow-ups that continuously make the platform safer and easier to operate.
- Shape the Tel Core roadmap by turning broad epics into clear designs and mentoring other engineers.
Skills you’ll bring
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience.
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, including owning substantial production backend systems in a SaaS or real‑time communications environment.
- Demonstrated proficiency in coding with AI agents to accelerate development and improve code quality.
- Deep expertise inC/C++ and Python.
- Experience with (or strong interest in learning) SIP, WebRTC, RTP/RTCP, DTLS/SRTP, and media codec negotiation in a production setting.
- Experience troubleshooting and improving real‑time media quality (e.g., jitter, packet loss, choppy audio, codec issues) is a strong plus.
- Comfortable working on KTLO (bugs, refactors, upgrades) as well as strategic roadmap items, and using data to prioritize impact.
- A deep understanding of reliability engineering, including the ability to build observability into services, eliminate performance bottlenecks, and manage the lifecycle of safe software releases.
- A strong sense of urgency, personal agency, and customer empathy.
- Passion for data driven decisions, building resilient systems, and solving classes of problems.
Our tech stack
- C, C++, Python, Go, Lua.
- Kubernetes, Redis, ElasticSearch, BigQuery.
- Google Cloud Platform: Cloud Run, GKE, Datastore, Pub/Sub.
