Software Engineer II, AI

In the time it takes you to read this job description, RapidSOS will have handled ~1,380 emergencies.
At RapidSOS, we are committed to using technology to build a safer, stronger future and working together to save lives. We're in an exciting phase of growth, welcoming new members from across the globe to our mission-driven, ambitious, and inclusive team. Our work is founded on our values of trust and safety, pioneering, urgency, and purpose over pride, all of which support a company culture where people can innovate, collaborate, grow, and, above all, make an impact.
RapidSOS is the leading public safety AI company that unlocks mission-critical intelligence for emergency response. It harnesses artificial and human intelligence to fuse life-saving data from the world's largest safety network, which includes over 700M+ connected devices and 200+ global technology companies. This intelligence is delivered to 23,000+ federal, state, and local agencies, serving one million first responders. RapidSOS has supported over one billion emergencies in 16 countries, powering RapidSOS HARMONY, the first purpose-built AI for public safety, designed to save critical time by automatically detecting emergencies, unifying real-time data and video streams, and coordinating a faster, more effective response. Learn more at www.RapidSOS.com.
What this role is about:
Our Voice AI team is building the next generation of intelligent safety technology. We build AI agents that triage incoming alerts in seconds, relieve the burden on emergency telecommunicators by handling non-emergency calls, and provide real-time translation between callers and call-takers. As an AI Engineer on this team, you'll own core capabilities end to end—from model behavior and backend architecture to evaluation tooling. Every improvement you ship shaves seconds off a response, and in an emergency, seconds are what save lives.
What you'll do:
End-to-end product delivery: Own Voice AI agent(s) capabilities from problem discovery and rapid experimentation through architecture, implementation, testing, deployment, and measurement of impact across the real-time agent, APIs, web application, and cloud infrastructure.
Improve conversational quality: Improve the caller experience—including latency, turn-taking, barge-in, speech recognition, multilingual behavior, protocol adherence, and transfers—using production evidence and reproducible experiments.
Safety and reliability: Design fail-safe behaviors, strengthen service resilience and observability, and respond to production issues through contributing factors analysis, mitigation, and prevention.
Evaluation and continuous improvement: Build and use automated evaluations, call-replay tools, production metrics, and controlled traffic trials to identify regressions, quantify trade-offs, and improve model and system behavior.
Work across the full stack, from Python backend and AI model behavior to the React/TypeScript UI that customers and operators use to configure and monitor their AI agents.
Use AI tools daily to move faster on code, testing, call analysis, and incident triage, while keeping full ownership of architecture, safety boundaries, and production decisions.
What we're looking for in our ideal candidate:
2-3+ years of back-end or full-stack engineering experience shipping production software end to end, with hands-on experience building AI/LLM applications and solid fundamentals in distributed systems, APIs, and operational reliability
Real-time voice, streaming media, or conversational agent experience is a strong plus
Strong Python proficiency, including async programming, with the flexibility to work full-stack, including our TypeScript/React frontend (prior experience with it a plus or open to learning)
Ability to evaluate non-deterministic AI behavior using datasets, automated metrics, qualitative call review, controlled experiments, and clear statistical reasoning
A genuine bias for action, balanced with care: a self-starter who moves fast with an ownership mindset, states intent rather than asks for permission, and doesn't cut corners on a safety-sensitive system
Product-minded problem solving: able to turn ambiguous problems into simple solutions, make evidence-based trade-offs, and own the outcome rather than only the implementation
Clear written and verbal communication along with a collaborative streak that raises the whole team's velocity
Genuinely AI-forward: fluent with AI-assisted coding, always looking for new ways to use AI to work faster, and pushing the envelope with fresh ideas on how we can do better as a team
Willingness to join a weekly on-call rotation and travel 1-2 times per quarter for in-person team gatherings (mostly within Europe)
What we offer:
The chance to work with a passionate team on solving one of the largest challenges globally
Competitive salary and benefits and equity participation
A dynamic, flexible and fun start-up work environment with a highly talented team
If you're curious to learn more about RapidSOS, you can check out https://rapidsos.com/blog/
RapidSOS is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, or Veteran status.
Interested in the role but you don't meet 100% of the requirements? We'd love to hear from you! We encourage you to apply; we'd be excited to see if your unique skill set and experience could be a match.

Work arrangement
No