Staff Engineer - Telephony

ABOUT SARVAM Sarvam is building the bedrock of Sovereign AI for India. The company is developing India’s full-stack sovereign AI platform, building across research, models, infrastructure and applications with a singular focus on making AI genuinely work for India. Sarvam works with leading enterprises and public institutions and is backed by Lightspeed, Peak XV, and Khosla Ventures. Sarvam partners with India’s leading brands, including Tata Capital, SBI Life, CRED, IDFC, and LIC. THE ROLE Samvaad is a conversational AI platform for enterprises, startups, digital natives, and governments. We are hiring hands-on technical owners who can take ambiguous problems through to reliable production systems. At the heart of Sarvam’s conversational AI platform sits the system that lets our customers build, configure, deploy, and operate voice agents and campaigns - at scale. The platform currently powers millions of voice calls a day that are deeply personalised and understands the users. We’re looking for a Staff Engineer to own this system end-to-end. The data model. The APIs. The orchestration. The reliability. The performance. The standards we hold ourselves to. This is an IC role with the scope and authority of one - no people management, just the systems and the bar. WHAT YOU’LL OWN - The end-to-end backend for agent, campaign, and user management - from data modeling through API design to deployment, in Python and FastAPI - Workflow orchestration with Temporal for complex, long-running, stateful operations - Performance and reliability for a multi-tenant SaaS platform operating at sub-second latency SLOs - Observability - logging, metrics, tracing - so the team can debug production confidently and quickly - Integration testing - the test infrastructure that lets us ship fast without breaking customer-facing systems - Close collaboration with the frontend team (Next.js) to deliver an experience worthy of the underlying platform - Setting the design-first and documentation-first engineering culture within your team - RFCs before code, decisions written down, no tribal knowledge WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR - 8-12 years building production backend systems, with deep expertise in Python and FastAPI (or Golang) - Must-have experience in building telephony infrastructure, primarily SIP / VoIP - A track record of full-stack ownership - you’ve designed systems end-to-end, made the trade-offs, and operated them in production - Hands-on experience with workflow orchestration at scale, ideally Temporal - Built and operated high-scale distributed systems - multi-tenant, low-latency, resilient under real load - Strong PostgreSQL and Redis fundamentals - schema design, query performance, caching strategy - The judgment to know when to build vs. buy, when to optimize vs. ship, when to abstract vs. inline NICE TO HAVE - Experience building products on top of LLMs or AI/ML systems - Time at an early- or growth-stage startup - comfort with ambiguity, speed, and ownership