---
title: 'Platform Engineer at Phonic'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/platform-engineer-phonic-san-francisco-fmd7e472dpy6'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-10'
---

# Platform Engineer at Phonic

- **Company:** Phonic
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-06-23
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-10
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/phonic/f52c5568-a7e0-4d1b-9962-56399c2e8bac

## Job description

## About Phonic

Phonic is a product and research lab focused on powering the most realistic, human-like voice AI conversations. We've re-thought the entire stack in pursuit of this goal, from models to product, to create voice agents that feel like they truly understand you, respond emotionally and perform agentic tasks with frontier intelligence. Our team includes top-tier AI researchers, international olympiad medalists, and former founders. Our customers include companies that are building voice-native AI products in industries such as customer support, healthcare, logistics, and recruiting. We have raised over $30M from tier 1 VCs.

## About the Team

Phonic has a very talent-dense and close-knit team. We collaborate with high trust and are constantly trying to improve how we work to deliver world-class research and product. Everyone takes ownership in what they do and they aren’t afraid to dive in headfirst into new problems.

## About The Role

As a Platform Engineer at Phonic, you'll build the foundation that lets our engineering team move fast without breaking things. Real-time voice AI at our scale is unforgiving — latency is visible, reliability is everything, and our systems need to perform flawlessly across hundreds of thousands of mission-critical calls every day. You'll own the infrastructure, tooling, and deployment systems that make that possible, freeing our backend and research teams to focus on pushing the frontier.

## What You'll Do

- Design and maintain the core infrastructure that powers Phonic's real-time voice AI platform - cloud infrastructure, deployment pipelines, and observability systems
- Build internal tooling and abstractions that improve engineering velocity across the team
- Own reliability and performance at scale - define SLOs, instrument monitoring, and lead incident response when things go wrong
- Partner closely with backend engineers and researchers to translate cutting-edge AI capabilities into production-ready systems
- Drive improvements to how we build, test, and ship software - reducing friction across the entire development lifecycle

## What You'll Bring

- Strong experience with cloud infrastructure - GCP, AWS, or Azure - and containerized deployments (Docker, Kubernetes)
- Proficiency with infrastructure-as-code tooling (Terraform or equivalent)
- A track record of improving reliability and developer experience in high-throughput, latency-sensitive systems
- Ownership mindset: you don't wait to be asked and you see problems through to the end
- Comfort dropping below the abstraction layer - able to debug at the level of bits and bytes when it's called for
- Strong system design instincts - clean architecture, high availability, and as few moving parts as possible
- A track record of driving performance at scale - pushing requests-per-second toward best-in-class efficiency

## Nice To Have

- Experience with real-time or streaming systems (WebSockets, WebRTC, or similar)
- Familiarity with ML/AI infrastructure — model serving, GPU workloads, or inference optimization
- Strong proficiency in TypeScript and Python
- You are a former founder

## Benefits

- 💸 Top-tier compensation: in order to get the best talent, we provide salary and equity that recognize your skillset
- 🥗 Meals: free breakfast, lunch, and dinner provided in the office
- 🩺 Healthcare: Comprehensive health, dental, and vision
- 🤝 We have regular off-sites and team celebrations

## About Phonic

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Phonic builds a speech-to-speech voice agent platform for enterprises, powered by proprietary audio foundation models to deliver natural, reliable conversations.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Seed stage)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA
- **Founded**: 2024
- **Founders**: Moin Nadeem, Nikhil Murthy

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: Voice AI, Enterprise Software, Artificial Intelligence
- **Target customers**: Enterprises deploying voice agents for customer support, operations, and high-trust interactions (B2B)
- **Mission or purpose statement**: “To make talking to voice AIs as simple and reliable as talking to humans.”

## Products & Services
- **[Phonic Platform]**: An end-to-end speech-to-speech platform for building, evaluating, and deploying voice agents. Features include real-time intelligence, observability, searchable interaction records, and containerized deployment within the customer’s environment. Leverages proprietary audio foundation models for low-latency (under 300ms) conversational voices.
- **[Maven Voice]**: An enterprise-grade AI voice agent built on Phonic’s platform, announced in August 2025 for chaotic, noisy, and unpredictable real-world situations.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed (private company)
- **Key Metric**: Total funding raised: $4M (Seed round, April 2025)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**:
  - Lead investor: Lux Capital
  - Angel investors include: Clement Delangue (Hugging Face CEO), Erik Bernhardsson (Modal), Michele Catasta, Douwe Kiela, Amjad Masad, Qasar Younis
- **Growth Signals**:
  - Seed round of $4M closed in April 2025 with strong investor backing from AI infrastructure leaders.
  - Employee count grew from founding team to ~18 as of April 2026 (estimated 18 from Tracxn; LinkedIn reported 6 in early 2026 before recent hires).
  - Launched Maven Voice in partnership with Maven AGI in August 2025, demonstrating enterprise traction.
  - Active hiring (engineering, research) indicates scaling phase.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Proprietary audio foundation models** that enable speech-to-speech within 300ms, achieving a natural conversational flow that rivals human interaction.
- **Full observability and evaluation stack** — built right into the platform so enterprises can monitor, debug, and improve agent conversations over time.
- **Secure, containerized deployment** — runs completely in the customer’s environment, addressing enterprise security and compliance requirements.
- **Real-time insights and failure analysis** across millions of agents, providing a system of record for voice interactions.

## Strategic Focus
- Continue building the most reliable speech-to-speech platform for enterprise-grade voice agents.
- Expand use cases beyond customer support into high-trust verticals such as healthcare, finance, and insurance.
- Grow the engineering and research team, particularly researchers experienced in audio modeling and production engineers.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: In-person, collaborative team in San Francisco (onsite workspace). The company emphasizes doing meaningful work in a fun environment.
- **Team**: Small, high-caliber team of researchers and engineers from top backgrounds (MIT, Jane Street, Robinhood, Hugging Face). Flat hierarchy with direct impact.
- **Mission**: Opportunity to define how humans interact with voice AI at scale, tackling reliability and naturalness challenges.
- **Perks**: Not publicly detailed, but typical early-stage startup benefits include equity, flexible PTO, and the chance to shape product and culture.
- **Growth**: Rapidly growing after a well‑funded seed round; new hires can expect high ownership and accelerated career development.

## Sources
1. [phonic.co](https://phonic.co/)
2. [phonic.co/company](https://phonic.co/company)
3. [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/phonic)
4. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/phonic-co)
5. [tracxn.com](https://tracxn.com/d/companies/phonic/__4TPVIPNDFpbV6xRNF8_OeUI3ZQMO-qYLkT5bm53BIx0)

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