AI Backend Developer

About Distance

Distance is an AI-powered sales coaching platform that helps businesses turn every customer conversation into better performance. Distance records and analyzes conversations - both on the phone and in the field - to surface opportunities, summarize interactions, identify objections, evaluate performance against custom sales rubrics, and deliver personalized coaching. Our goal is simple: give every salesperson and manager an AI coach that understands every conversation and helps them continuously improve.

We’re looking for an AI Backend Developer to help build the intelligence layer behind Distance.

You’ll work on the systems that transform thousands of real-world conversations into structured data, insights, coaching, and actions. This spans the full AI pipeline - from audio ingestion and transcription pipelines to LLM orchestration, conversation analysis, scoring systems, retrieval, and APIs that power the Distance product.

This is a hands-on engineering role for someone who enjoys shipping quickly, experimenting with new AI capabilities, and solve the hard problem of making LLM-powered systems reliable enough for real customers.

• Build and scale backend services powering Distance's AI features.
• Build workflows for sales coaching, lead assessment, deal tagging, objection detection, note taking, and performance evaluation.
• Design systems that evaluate conversations against customizable sales rubrics.
• Build retrieval and context systems that allow users to ask Distance questions across thousands of conversations.
• Develop structured data extraction and classification pipelines from unstructured conversations.
• Improve the accuracy, latency, reliability, and cost efficiency of our AI systems.
• Design APIs and data models that support web and mobile applications.
• Build evaluation frameworks to measure and continuously improve AI output quality.
• Work closely with product and engineering to rapidly prototype and ship new AI capabilities.

• You’re a strong backend engineer who is excited about building production AI systems - not just experimenting with models.
• 3+ years of experience building highly optimized back-end solutions in Golang, Protobuf, gRPC, and GraphQL
• 3+ years of experience in managing resources in Google Cloud Platform using Terraform IAC (or similar). Experience in managing a Kubernetes cluster is a must
• You’re comfortable working with LLM APIs and understand concepts such as structured outputs, tool calling, retrieval, embeddings, prompt design, context management, and model evaluation.
• Experience building voice AI, speech-to-text systems, agentic workflows, RAG systems, or high-volume data pipelines is a strong plus.
• Strong experience in building reliable, performant, maintainable, and testable code - with proper abstraction
• A collaborative spirit and the ability to work effectively within a team
• Proficient in English with good writing and communication skills

• AI is fundamentally changing how companies understand and improve customer conversations. Distance is building the intelligence layer that turns those conversations into actionable insights and measurable improvements in sales performance.
• You’ll join at an early stage, work directly on the core AI product, and have meaningful influence over the architecture and direction of the platform.