Senior Full-Stack Developer (Voice Recognition)

About Us
At Near, we help top talent in Latin America find remote roles with US companies. Our mission is to create better lives by fostering a remote work culture that transcends borders.

About Our Client
Our client is a US non-profit focused on early literacy. They offer 1-to-1 reading tutoring for children from kindergarten to second grade, online volunteer reading programs, and a free global digital library.

They are looking for a Senior Full-Stack Developer with voice recognition experience to build the voice features of their literacy platform.

About the Role
We are looking for a Senior Full-Stack Developer (Voice Recognition) to build and maintain our client’s literacy platform across Ruby on Rails and React with TypeScript. Your first focus will be voice: speech-to-text and text-to-speech features that help young children learn to read.

You will train and deploy machine learning models with audio and turn them into working product features. You will also help with offline-first web apps for low-bandwidth schools and the migration away from a legacy Backbone codebase, working closely with the lead developers based in the UK.

The ideal candidate is a hands-on engineer who uses today’s AI tools every day and builds their own skills and tools to work faster. You can explain and defend your technical choices clearly, and side projects that show this are a plus.

Responsibilities

• Build voice features, including speech-to-text and text-to-speech, for a reading platform used by young learners
• Train machine learning models with audio data and deploy them to production
• Evaluate and integrate voice and audio tools such as Piper, ElevenLabs, and Hugging Face models
• Develop front-end features in JavaScript, React, and TypeScript
• Maintain and extend back-end features in Ruby on Rails
• Help build offline-first web apps that work well in low-bandwidth schools
• Support the migration away from a legacy Backbone codebase
• Use AI coding tools such as Claude Code and Copilot, and create skills or tools that make the team more effective
• Collaborate with the lead developers in the UK on design, reviews, and priorities
• Explain your technical decisions and how you used AI tools in your work

What We’re Looking For

• Hands-on experience training and deploying machine learning models with audio data. You’ll be asked to share projects that show this work, so please have examples ready (repositories, demos, or a walkthrough of what you built)
• Strong JavaScript skills, including React and TypeScript
• Active, hands-on use of AI coding tools, such as building skills or tools with Claude Code or Copilot, with work examples
• Familiarity with Hugging Face and audio recognition tools
• Advanced English: a clear, fluent communicator (a slight accent is fine)
• Experience with voice recognition, speech-to-text, or text-to-speech products (a plus)
• Experience with voice tools like Piper or ElevenLabs (a plus)
• Experience with PyTorch or torchaudio (a plus)
• Experience with Ruby on Rails (a plus)
• Experience building offline-first web apps (a plus)
• Experience migrating legacy Backbone code (a plus)
• Test-driven development (TDD) practice (a plus)
• Side projects that show hands-on AI or voice work (a plus)

Perks – What’s in It for You?

• Compensation: $5,000 USD per month
• Fully remote opportunity
• Full-time, 6-month contract 
• Flexible schedule following US Eastern Time (ET) hours
• 2 weeks of Paid Time Off (PTO) per year
• US public holidays
• Meaningful work helping young children learn to read
• Payments made in USD

Hiring Process

• 8-minute Hireflix video interview
• Take-home assessment 
• Interview with the Hiring Manager to review the assessment, including the AI tools, prompts, and agent work used
• Final interview with the CEO