Senior Software Engineer

About Humanize

Behind every business decision is a person — what they want, what they would tell a friend, or why they quietly left. But actually talking to them has always been too slow and expensive to do often. Everything else is a guess.

AI started to change that — but most tools stopped at surveys or one-off interviews. Useful, but lacking interaction. Real insight comes from conversation: people riffing off each other, challenging assumptions, saying the thing they didn't plan to say.

Humanize powers AI-moderated group conversations with real people and translates what they said into the tools where decisions actually happen. We're building a world where the customer's voice is always in the room — not only when someone commissions a study.

Where We Are

• Funded. We just closed our pre-seed, with participation from Sovereign's Capital, Hearst Ventures, and Cubit Capital, plus angels including Jason Karp, Brett Hurt, Dan Kloiber, and Jesse Pujji.
• Founders. Multiple prior exits between us, including companies built to $1B+ valuations.
• Traction. Live with paying customers and growing rapidly month-over-month. We're heads-down on product, not press — happy to share specifics under NDA.

Location & Logistics

• Hybrid / Remote-friendly — NYC office overlooking the city near Columbus Circle, with a distributed team
• Reports to: CTO
• Visa: We're not able to sponsor work authorization at this time

About the Role

We're looking for a Senior Software Engineer who ships with urgency but doesn't cut corners. Someone who spots a bug, opens a ticket, and fixes it — without waiting for anyone to ask. Someone who resolves ambiguity before it slows the team down. You'll own features end-to-end, from system design to production.

What You'll Do

• Build and improve the AI voice agent that moderates live group conversations — turn-taking, cross-talk, silence, and the moment someone says the thing they weren't going to say
• Work on real-time systems — live audio/video, per-participant transcription, session orchestration
• Extend our AI analysis pipeline — sentiment, theme extraction, and structured output the rest of the company actually uses
• Build the agents that find the right people to talk to — recruitment, screening, and panel quality
• Evolve our data layer — migrations, security policies, type-safe query patterns
• Own third-party integrations
• Use AI coding agents as a core part of your workflow — we treat these as multipliers, not crutches
• Collaborate directly with product and design to scope and ship work
• Review code, surface risks early, and help the team move faster

Technical Challenges

• AI moderating a group, not a 1:1. Most "AI interviewers" handle one person at a time. We're orchestrating five — managing turn-taking, follow-ups, drift, and the unprompted moment that's the whole point of qualitative research. Real-time, multi-speaker, low-latency.
• Recruitment as an agent. Given a research goal, find the right participants — not just on paper, but ones who'll actually show up and engage. Sourcing, screening, no-show prediction, panel health over time.
• Sentiment, not surveys. Reading video, voice, and language together to surface what people meant, not just what they said — and routing it into the systems where decisions actually get made.
• Conversation → decision. Turning hours of group conversation into structured outputs that flow into Linear, Notion, Slack, and the dashboards the customer already lives in.

What We're Looking For

Technical

• 5+ years building production software
• Strong TypeScript and React — you've built complex, stateful UIs beyond CRUD forms
• Experience with Python (used in our realtime AI agents)
• Solid PostgreSQL skills — migrations, indexing, row-level security, JSONB
• Experience building and maintaining APIs (REST or RPC)
• Comfort with real-time systems (WebSockets, WebRTC)
• Familiarity with LLM/AI integration in production — prompt design, streaming, structured extraction

As a Person

• Negative maintenance. You make life easier for everyone around you. You fix things before they become problems. You ask yourself: what can I do today that will reduce future work for others?
• Non-attached action. You ship the functional version first and iterate — no gold-plating v1. You'll build something knowing it may be rewritten, and when the evidence says pivot, you pivot without ego.
• Proactively curious. When something doesn't make sense, you dig in and challenge it — not shrug and move on.
• Reliable. If you said you'll do it, it's getting done. No news is good news — and if it's not, you raise the flag early.
• Give a damn. You show up with energy, not just availability. You care about the product, the users, and the people you work with, and it's obvious.

Tech Stack

React / TanStack / shadcn / Hono / Kysely / Supabase / Vercel / LiveKit

What We Offer

• $175,000 – $225,000 base + meaningful equity
• Health, dental, and vision insurance
• Unlimited PTO
• Ground floor of an early-stage company — shape the product, the architecture, and the culture from the start
• Hard, interesting problems at the intersection of real-time systems, AI, and research

How to Apply

Email orr@humanize.app with:

1. Your resume
2. A LinkedIn link
3. A short note on something remarkable you've built or shipped — and why it mattered