About The Role

You will be hands-on in production — owning a speech AI API platform, building and scaling backend and frontend systems, debugging failures in real time, and leading a team of 4–8 engineers and interns.

This is a founding-stage hire. You will be among the first engineers shaping how we build — your technical decisions will define the architecture, standards and culture of the engineering team for years to come.

You will report directly to the CEO and own architecture, code quality, delivery, infrastructure decisions and mentoring across the full stack.

If you are someone who thrives in high-ownership environments, stays calm when things break, and cares deeply about building systems that actually work — this role is for you.

What You Will Own

Own architecture, code quality and delivery across a full stack codebase
Design and build scalable backend APIs and microservices supporting real-time speech processing and billing
Own backend architecture decisions — database design, service structure and data flow
Manage cloud infrastructure on AWS
Ensure APIs and services are always online and recover cleanly from failures
Debug production issues in real time across audio pipelines, APIs and data workflows
Set engineering standards, conduct code reviews and mentor junior team members
Coordinate engineers and interns across the team
Own CI/CD pipelines and deployment workflows

What You Actually Are

You are comfortable making decisions with incomplete specs
You document assumptions and tradeoffs without being asked
You prioritise predictability over cleverness
You stay calm when production breaks and fix things without waiting for permission
You lead by example — your team follows your technical standard, not just your title
You do not wait to be told what to do when something is wrong

Non-Negotiables

5+ years in backend, systems or full stack engineering
Expert in TypeScript — comfortable owning server and client code end-to-end
Strong production API design — REST, WebSockets, auth, rate limiting
Strong database experience — schema design, migrations, transactions and query performance
AWS production experience
Testing discipline — unit, integration and e2e
Security mindset — secrets management, API keys, PII boundaries
Familiarity with data privacy and compliance requirements across different regions
Debugged live production systems under real user traffic
Comfortable being accountable for system behaviour, not just code

Strong Plus

Real-time systems — WebSocket session management, audio streaming
Multi-tenant SaaS — billing, usage tracking, plan management
Observability and monitoring in production
AI and API integration across multiple third-party providers
Speech and ASR domain knowledge
Experience with regional data compliance and privacy regulations — PDPA, PDPL or similar

This Role Is Wrong For You If...

You prefer research over production
You dislike being on-call or handling outages
You avoid debugging under pressure
You need highly detailed specs before moving forward
You are optimising for title, visibility or resume optics

Who Will Thrive Here

Engineers who take full ownership of what they build and ship
Systems thinkers who see the whole pipeline, not just their part
Calm debuggers of complex and unexpected production failures
Technical leaders who lead by doing, not just directing
High-agency individuals who care about real-world impact

What You'll Get

Up to USD 2,000 per month + meaningful ESOP
Fully remote — open to candidates in Vietnam, Pakistan, Thailand, Indonesia and Central Asia with good connectivity and proper remote setup
Report directly to the CEO with full technical ownership
Lead and grow a team of 4–8 engineers
Growth measured by system ownership and trust, not titles

About VALSEA

We're building the speech intelligence layer for Southeast Asia — turning real-world, accented, code-switched speech into structured, usable outputs for businesses.

Full Stack Tech Lead Founding Engineer