Software Engineer

About Equal

Founded in 2022, Equal is building India's AI-native identity and consumer platform. We've scaled from zero to 350+ enterprise partners and 1M+ monthly active users for our voice AI assistant in record time. Following a $30M Series B in 2026 co-led by Prosus Ventures and Tomales Bay Capital, we are entering a hyper-growth phase. With total funding over $42M, we are aggressively expanding our product footprint into new consumer verticals that will redefine digital identity for millions.

The Engineering Challenge

Building an assistant that people talk to is a complex engineering problem. We operate over ordinary phone calls in a country with a hundred languages and patchy networks.

• Continuous Voice Streams: We maintain long-lived websocket sessions that carry live audio frames in both directions. Connection loss and provider failures are handled seamlessly to ensure the user experience remains uninterrupted.
• Latency Optimization: We maintain strict latency budgets to ensure instant transcription, retrieval, inference, and synthesis.
• Natural Conversation Flow: Our system excels at managing conversational dynamics, including interruptions. We enable natural back-and-forth dialogue where the assistant understands user intent, pauses instantly, and resumes the thread seamlessly.
• Localized Intelligence: We solve for real-world speech patterns—including code-switching, accents, and colloquial dialects—to deliver highly accurate, human-like interaction.
• Quality at Scale: We operate a model-based system requiring rigorous instrumentation and automated evaluation to ensure reliability.

Levels & Scope

The bar for excellence is constant, even as scope evolves with experience.

• Software Engineer (1–3 yrs): You lead a specific feature within a surface, shipped to real users. You collaborate with design partners to bring your features to production.
• Senior Software Engineer (3–6 yrs): You lead a user-facing surface of the assistant, end to end. You are provided with a problem and the metric to move; you own the design and implementation decisions.

At both levels, you own your shipping cadence, the instrumentation that validates performance, and the clarity of your results.

How we work with AI

We are AI-first in how we build, not only in what we build — and we mean something more specific than letting people use Cursor. We expect you to design the workflow, not run the tool.

• We build workflows, not prompts: You turn successful results into defined workflows with verification built in, so the next engineer achieves the same outcome.
• We engineer context deliberately: You can explain what you include for the model and what you leave out, distinguishing between a model that is incapable and one that simply requires more context.
• We move load-bearing systems: You re-architect live services by building verification layers first, ensuring stability during rapid iteration.
• We stay at the frontier: You hold a specific, informed view of what is possible and update it as new evidence changes the landscape.

What we are looking for

• Something you took from nothing to real users — a product, a company, or a side project people actually used. That it existed and somebody used it matters more than whether it succeeded.
• Strong Fundamentals: You possess deep understanding of code, data structures, and debugging.
• Ambiguity Management: You operate with goals rather than specifications. When faced with an unclear brief, your response is a written proposal.
• Accountability: You are responsible for outcomes, not just shipping. You monitor your own instrumentation to analyze performance and iterate based on results.
• Product Taste: You recognize when an experience feels right, notice when something is off, and maintain the drive to iterate until it meets our high standards.

Our Tech Stack

Python (core services and voice pipeline), Rust (latency-critical media path), AI harness for agent loops/prompts/evals, persistent WebSocket sessions, speech/language models routed live, AWS, Postgres, Redis, Kotlin, and Swift.

We value how you think and your ability to learn; we expect you to pick up unfamiliar technologies within your first month.