Sr. Software Engineer

Dialpad • Kitchener, Canada • 2d ago

Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs

Within the SaaS ecosystem, telephony and real time media sit at the infrastructure layer where product experience is inseparable from platform reliability. This Senior Software Engineer role is notable because it focuses on the core calling stack, the kind of subsystem that underpins customer trust at scale and forces strong engineering choices around latency, resilience, and interoperability across PSTN and WebRTC boundaries.

For a long term SaaS engineering career, work like this builds uncommon depth in operating production systems with strict performance constraints. The day to day emphasis on observability, incident investigation, safe releases, and capacity testing translates directly to other high availability SaaS domains where uptime and quality are business critical. The remit also includes turning broad epics into designs and mentoring, which is often the bridge from senior individual contributor work into technical leadership in platform teams.

This role tends to suit engineers who enjoy owning hard to reproduce production problems, iterating with data, and balancing KTLO with longer horizon improvements. It also fits professionals who want a SaaS environment where backend engineering meets networking and media fundamentals, and where learning new real time protocols is part of the job rather than a prerequisite.

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.