About Relay Hawk

We’re building real-time voice AI agents that deliver in the chaotic, high-pressure world of call centers and BPOs.

Relay Hawk brings modern AI and automation to the telephony industry, without trapping callers in endless loops or dead-end bots. Our agents connect seamlessly to CRMs, calendars, CCaaS platforms, and more, giving callers instant answers or routing them to a human when it matters most. When the AI hits a limit, we give the caller a seamless transfer to a human with all the context for a frustration-free experience.

We’re engineers and builders who have lived the pain of legacy systems. We’re early, hands-on, and based in NYC. If you’re excited about building ambitious AI infrastructure grounded in the real world, we’d love to work with you.

The Role

As our first software engineer, you’ll help define what Relay Hawk becomes. This is a product engineering role with real scope: you’ll build the infrastructure that powers low-latency, real-time voice AI agents – and the APIs, tools, and internal systems that make the magic happen.

You’ll own full features end to end, from backend logic to user-facing interfaces. You'll work closely with the founder and early customers, turning messy real-world needs into clean, scalable systems. We build on top of modern telephony stacks (SignalWire, Twilio, Deepgram), so you don’t need telephony experience – just curiosity, creativity, and strong engineering fundamentals.

You’ll help us move fast, ship reliable systems, and build a product customers genuinely love.

You Will

• Build the infrastructure that powers real-time phone calls between AI agents, APIs, and humans.
• Develop integrations with third-party platforms (CRMs, CCaaS, calendars, etc.).
• Create APIs and webhook endpoints to ensure fast, reliable, event-driven systems.
• Design and implement internal tooling to manage AI sessions, call flows, and logging.
• Write clean, well-tested code that’s built to scale and recover gracefully from edge cases.
• Shape our technical foundation from CI/CD to observability and from event-driven workflows to service orchestration.
• Set the bar for engineering culture, process, and quality from day one.

You Have

• 5+ years of software engineering experience.
• Proficiency with at least one popular programming language.
• Strong backend skills: experience designing and building RESTful APIs and working with distributed systems.
• Experience with event-driven or asynchronous systems (e.g. Pub/Sub, queues, webhooks).
• Familiarity with cloud platforms and tools like DynamoDB, S3, or Lambda.
• Strong product thinking: you're comfortable making tradeoffs and building with real users in mind.
• Clear communication, whether it’s in code, writing, or conversation.
• Curiosity about AI – and how it changes the way we build and interact with software.

Bonus Points

• You’ve built workflow automation tools (e.g. Zapier, Make, n8n, Retool).
• You have experience with voice technologies (e.g. STT, TTS, programmable voice APIs).
• You’ve worked with LLMs or developed LLM evaluation/test frameworks.
• You've shipped a startup product or worked in a 0→1 environment.
• You are fluent in Python, with experience writing clean, maintainable, and efficient code.
• You have hands-on experience with AWS.

Compensation

$140k-$160k + equity

Location

This is an in-person NYC role where you’ll collaborate directly with the founder to shape the product and company.

Application Process

To apply, please complete this Google Form. We will reply to you within five business days with the next steps.

Relay Hawk is an equal-opportunity employer. We encourage candidates from all backgrounds and experiences to apply.