Senior Backend Engineer

About the company

Speech Graphics is the leading audio-driven facial animation provider in the video-game industry. Unlike other technologies, Speech Graphics employs detailed muscle maps for extremely accurate real-time lip-sync. 

The company trades under two brands - 'Speech Graphics' and 'Rapport'.

Rapport is an innovative platform that integrates AI with animated digital characters, enabling engaging and meaningful interactions in any language. The Rapport platform is being used to bring best-in-class digital experiences to multiple sectors, including corporate training, immersive learning, and virtual influencers. 

With a culture that thrives on collaboration, creativity and pushing technological boundaries, we are committed to providing a workplace where people can grow, innovate and make an impact. Our teams are diverse, passionate, and driven by a shared goal of building groundbreaking products that shape the future of digital animation.

The Role

As a Backend Engineer in our Rapport team, you will play a crucial role in designing, implementing, and maintaining backend services that can run both on cloud, and on premise. Your primary focus will be on our TypeScript Node.js stack, ensuring our systems are scalable, secure, and efficient. This position requires both a deep understanding of backend technologies, and a basic knowledge of cloud technologies and services of the major cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure).

If you are a highly motivated and experienced Backend Engineer with a passion for building scalable, high-performance systems in a collaborative and dynamic environment, we encourage you to apply and join our innovative team at Speech Graphics.

Key Responsibilities

  • Develop, test, and deploy backend services and APIs for cloud-based applications.
  • Ensure the performance, scalability, and reliability of backend systems.
  • Collaborate with Frontend Engineers, Site Reliability Engineers, and other team members to create seamless and efficient solutions.
  • Stay up-to-date in backend and cloud technologies.
  • Ensure security best practices are followed in backend development.
  • Monitor and troubleshoot backend systems to ensure high availability and reliability.
  • Implement and maintain logging, monitoring, and alerting solutions.
  • Perform regular maintenance tasks and updates.

Please note the above is illustrative, not exhaustive. Accordingly, there may be a requirement to undertake additional duties, consistent with the level of the post, as directed by management.

Requirements

Qualifications/ memberships or equivalent 🎓

  • A bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, or a related field


Experience, skills and knowledge ✍️

  • Proven experience as a backend engineer, with a focus on cloud-based solutions.
  • Strong experience with at least one major cloud provider (AWS, Azure, GCP).
  • Proficiency in backend programming languages such as Node.js, Go or Python. 
  • Experience with microservices architecture and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes).
  • Experience with CI/CD pipelines and DevOps practices.
  • Solid understanding of database systems (SQL and NoSQL) and data modeling.
  • Knowledge of version control systems (e.g., Git).

Personal qualities & attributes 💥

  • Excellent collaboration and communication skills, with the ability to work effectively with cross-functional teams and convey technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders.
  • Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to diagnose and resolve complex technical issues efficiently.
  • Commitment to continuous learning and staying updated with the latest advancements in cloud technologies and industry trends.

Additional 💻

  • Legal right to work in Hungary
  • Ability to communicate in English fluently

Benefits

This position will join an incredibly talented and diverse workforce as part of a pioneering and visionary technology start-up. In return, on top of a competitive salary you can expect:

  • Additional paid leave over the festive period (full company closure)
  • Annual Learning and Development budget
  • Anonymous health and wellbeing platform
  • Flexible working location

Other info:

We value our staff and treat everyone with respect and without discrimination. We are committed to encouraging equality and diversity among our workforce and eliminating unlawful discrimination. The aim is for our workforce to be truly representative of all sections of society and our customers, and for each employee to feel respected and able to give their best. We are an equal opportunity employer and encourage applications from a diverse and multicultural workforce.

The established company Speech Graphics Ltd has headquarters based in Edinburgh and with other workbases located in Hungary, Singapore and the USA.

At Speech Graphics we specialise in one of the holy grails of computer facial animation: automatic, accurate lip sync. Given audio, our task is to create the illusion that the animated face you see is the source of the sound you hear. This illusion is notoriously difficult to achieve: the movements of speech are fast, complex and subtle, and viewers are highly sensitive to any mismatch between the face and the voice. Our world-class pipeline incorporates powerful speech analysis and procedural animation techniques to achieve this illusion consistently, allowing animators to handle overwhelming demand for high-quality dialogue.But Speech Graphics goes beyond good lip sync. Speech contains energy and emotion, and that too can be decoded from the voice and synchronised in the face. Using all available acoustic information, our algorithms drive not just the mouth but the entire face from audio input, from syllables to scowls.With the success of Speech Graphics, our technology has been pushed out to a wider market through Rapport.Rapport are building a fast-growing team of brand evangelists, scientists, engineers, designers, and doers who are focused on creating a positive future for human-machine communication. We solve hard problems and hold ourselves and our tech to a higher standard. We bring to life the physical manifestation of a brand, putting a face to the name. We are not your average “animation company”. We tackle every project with unbridled enthusiasm, promising to deliver the best experience--whether that be for internal employees, or enterprise leaders, customers, and clients.Rapport’s Speech Graphics engine takes a voice stream and analyses the spoken and unspoken sounds in the audio to capture the emotions of the speaker and generate the metrics to animate a digital avatar. The engine can coordinate data streams with external speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and conversational AIs to create seamless, low-latency conversations in real-time.

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