About Pendulum

Pendulum is an immersive language learning company. Language is the instrument of culture. When we learn to speak a new language, we learn to see a bigger world. ****But the way we learn new languages is broken. We don’t learn to speak by memorizing vocabulary, drilling conjugations lists or playing daily games with a green owl. We learn by immersing ourselves in the language—by hearing it, seeing it, and using it as a vessel for connection. Pendulum brings this to life for the first time ever in a digital format by leveraging the latest in conversational voice AI and autonomous LLM agents. We create immersive, personalised and ever-evolving digital worlds for language learning where users step into dynamic narratives and conversational roleplay tailored to their interests, personality, and fluency level. Instead of rote grammar drills or generic dialogues, learners engage in evolving, open-ended scenarios where they actively shape their journey through language.

Role and Qualifications

We are looking for an ****engineer to join our small and mighty team to build the backend systems that power our conversational voice experiences and LLM-driven digital environments. You’ll play a key role in designing and building scalable, high-performance backend services that interface with real-time audio streaming, voice and language models, and personalised content generation. You’ll work closely with the rest of the team to ensure seamless integration across product, infrastructure, and AI components.

Recent examples of backend challenges we’ve tackled include:

• Real-time WebRTC audio streaming with Whisper transcription and LLM orchestration.
• Dynamic conversational agents that can be interrupted mid-speech and resume naturally.
• Integrating generative image and voice services into a unified pipeline.
• Orchestrating cloud infrastructure for low-latency inference across multiple models.

What we’re looking for:

• 5+ years of backend engineering experience, with strong expertise in Python. Deep experience with FastAPI or similar Python web frameworks is a must.
• Experience leading tech critical projects within your team and organisation.
• Experience building and scaling LLM-powered applications, particularly those involving visual AI, agentic workflows, or voice-based AI interactions.
• Comfortable designing and implementing scalable, production-grade systems on cloud infrastructure with high reliability and low latency.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals with the ability to pragmatically think through sensible and robust software design and architecture.
• You can ship at high velocity without compromising on quality and are comfortable figuring out how to build things you haven't built before.
• Experience working with WebRTC or real-time media streaming technologies is desirable.
• Experience working with frontend technologies (React, Typescript) is an asset.

Our Stack