Rime is a foundation modeling company that builds voice AI for enterprises running customer experiences at scale. Our models are purpose-built for high-volume conversational deployments, engineered for the accuracy, performance, and deployment flexibility that production environments actually demand.
We started from a different premise than the rest of the field: build voice AI for human connection, not slop. Before we trained a single model, we built our own corpus: full-duplex, studio-quality conversational speech of normal people, recorded and annotated by linguists. It's why our models are unparalleled in naturalism, and it's why enterprises pick Rime when pilots need to make it to production.
Role Overview
We're hiring a Software Engineer to own the serving infrastructure that connects Rime's inference engines to the world. This role sits at the intersection of ML systems and cloud infrastructure — you'll work directly on model inference and cloud infrastructure to build, harden, and scale the systems that stream voice at real-time latency. As Rime moves toward its next-generation architecture, you'll be a core architect of how our models get served.
What You'll Own
Architecture and implementation of Rime's TTS serving infrastructure, from GPU-backed inference engines to the API surface.
Model optimization from a single-node to disaggregated fleet serving.
Compatibility with different NVIDIA hardwares from Hopper to Blackwell and beyond for on-prem and cloud deployments.
Continuous integration and deployment workflows for the model serving pipeline.
Site reliability: on-call rotation, monitoring, alerting, and observability across the serving stack.
Resource provision, cost management across our GPU fleet.
What We're Looking For
Hands-on experience with real-time multinode ML serving infrastructure — ML serving framework experience: NVIDIA Dynamo/Triton, vLLM, SGLang, or equivalent.
Experience with distributed or disaggregated model serving (Tensor Parallel, Pipeline Parallel, or equivalent).
Strong cloud infrastructure fundamentals: Linux internals, networking, containerization (Docker, Kubernetes).
IaC experience — Terraform, Packer, or comparable. You should have opinions about how to do this right.
On-call is part of the job. You treat production reliability as a shared responsibility.
Nice to Have
Experience with multinode training (DDP, FSDP, etc.).
Experience with gRPC or other bidirectional binary streaming protocols.
Experience with audio streaming and related technologies (WebRTC, WebSockets, etc.).
Experience with a multilingual monorepo where you pick the best language out of merit more than personal experience.
Experience with multi-cloud infrastructures (AWS, GCP, OCI, etc.).
Comfort with configuration management tooling (Ansible, Chef, Puppet, or similar).
SRE, DevOps, or platform engineering background at a startup.
Experience at an early-stage company.
Why Join Rime
Build the serving infrastructure behind a category-defining voice AI company from the ground up.
You will bring in experience that no one else currently has at the company: you can help us set the vision.
Direct collaboration with the inference, platform, and ML teams — no handoff culture.
The systems you build determine what experiences our customers can deploy at scale.
Meaningful equity upside at an early stage.
High ownership, high standards, low bureaucracy.
SF / Bay Area.
At Rime, we...
Are outliers
Cut through the hype to focus on the craft
Move fast with agency and freedom
Maintain a growth mindset, finding joy in the struggle
Do the right things, knowing that it'll lead to making money
Skills Required
- Hands-on experience with real-time multinode ML serving infrastructure
- Experience with ML serving frameworks such as NVIDIA Dynamo, Triton, vLLM, SGLang, or equivalent
- Experience with distributed or disaggregated model serving, including Tensor Parallel, Pipeline Parallel, or equivalent
- Strong cloud infrastructure fundamentals, including Linux internals, networking, and containerization
- Experience with Docker and Kubernetes
- Infrastructure-as-code experience with Terraform, Packer, or comparable tools
- Willingness to participate in an on-call rotation and share production reliability responsibility
- Experience with multinode training, such as DDP or FSDP
- Experience with gRPC or other bidirectional binary streaming protocols
- Experience with audio streaming technologies such as WebRTC or WebSockets
- Experience working in a multilingual monorepo
- Experience with multi-cloud infrastructure such as AWS, GCP, or OCI
- Familiarity with configuration management tools such as Ansible, Chef, or Puppet
- SRE, DevOps, or platform engineering background at a startup
- Experience at an early-stage company
What We Do
Unusual Ventures is raising the bar for what founders should expect from their venture investors. We enable startups with the hands on support and expertise they need to be successful during their early stage journey. Unusual Ventures is an early-stage firm that invests in both enterprise and consumer startups.
