Tavus

Tavus is building the human layer of AI, aiming to make human-AI interaction as natural as face-to-face communication. We pioneer research in multimodal AI for modeling human communication (language, audio, video) and generating audio-visual avatar behavior, powering applications from text-to-video avatars to real-time conversational video. We are a Series B company backed by top investors, seeking individuals who thrive in startup environments, can prioritize independently, and are willing to take calculated risks to help pave the path forward.

Tavus is a research lab pioneering human computing and building AI Humans, a new interface that bridges the gap between people and machines. Our real-time human simulation models enable machines to see, hear, respond, and appear realistic, facilitating meaningful, face-to-face conversations. AI Humans combine human emotional intelligence with machine reach and reliability, offering capable, trusted agents available 24/7 in any language. We are seeking a Senior Software Engineer to be a technical leader on our Conversational Video Interface (CVI) product, a multimodal real-time conversational system. This is a hands-on role where your code will operate in the middle of live conversations between people and AI Humans.

Tavus is a research lab pioneering human computing by building AI Humans, a new interface designed to bridge the gap between people and machines. Our real-time human simulation models enable machines to perceive, communicate, and appear realistic, facilitating meaningful, face-to-face conversations. AI Humans aim to combine human emotional intelligence with machine reliability, offering capable, trusted agents available 24/7 across all languages. We are a Series A company backed by prominent investors and are seeking individuals passionate about shaping a future where humans and machines achieve genuine understanding.

Tavus is a research lab pioneering human computing, building AI Humans that serve as a new interface between people and machines. These AI Humans combine human emotional intelligence with machine reach and reliability, enabling meaningful, face-to-face conversations with capabilities like seeing, hearing, responding, and realistic appearance. The company is backed by prominent investors and is seeking individuals passionate about shaping a future where humans and machines achieve mutual understanding.

About Us Tavus is a research lab pioneering human computing. We’re building AI Humans: a new interface that closes the gap between people and machines, free from the friction of today’s systems. Our real-time human simulation models let machines see, hear, respond, and even look real—enabling meaningful, face-to-face conversations. AI Humans combine the emotional intelligence of humans with the reach and reliability of machines, making them capable, trusted agents available 24/7, in every language, on our terms. Imagine a therapist anyone can afford. A personal trainer that adapts to your schedule. A fleet of medical assistants that can give every patient the attention they need. With Tavus, individuals, enterprises, and developers can all build AI Humans to connect, understand, and act with empathy at scale. We’re a Series B company backed by world-class investors including Sequoia Capital, Y Combinator, and Scale Venture Partners. Be part of shaping a future where humans and machines truly understand each other. The Role We're hiring a Senior Software Engineer (Infrastructure) to own the systems behind CVI, our real-time conversational product. Every live conversation between a person and a PAL runs on infrastructure your team owns. You'll take goals like uptime, latency, and cost and chase them wherever they lead, including into backend services and product code. What you'll own - CVI's inference deployments. The GPU infrastructure serving live conversations across multiple providers and regions. You'll join as an early senior member of a growing infra team, working on projects like tuning the newest GPU generations and cutting cold-start and model load times so users wait less. - Expanding our GPU footprint. You'll bring on new providers and regions, stand up clusters on EKS, and build the routing, scheduling, and throughput needed for fast weight loading. - Uptime. You'll be one of the people pushing our uptime bar higher, along with the security and SOC2 work that keeps our infrastructure trustworthy. - Fix what you find. When you see a problem, you have the trust and the mandate to fix it or flag it. Reworking our deploy pipeline so shipping is fast and boring is exactly the kind of thing you'd take on. What this role has shipped - Multi-provider, multi-region inference infrastructure: routes live conversations across GPU providers and regions, so one provider's outage never becomes a user's problem - CUDA optimizations for Phoenix, our video rendering model: doubled the frame rate by tracing and optimizing hot paths with our researchers - Parallel conversations on a single GPU: several live conversations sharing one card, multiplying what the fleet can serve Who you are - You own outcomes. You don't stop where "infrastructure" ends. If the fix lives in backend code or the CVI stack, you dive in, and you don't wait for a ticket to do it. - You're energized by unfamiliar problems. If the next thing that matters is standing up a training deployment you've never touched, you jump in and learn on the fly. - You adapt as priorities evolve. In a space moving this fast, the most important thing to build can change as we learn. When it does, you adjust course without losing momentum. - You care about this problem. Keeping large-scale, real-time systems fast and reliable is something you think about unprompted. Requirements - Hands-on GPU inference experience. You've deployed and optimized inference workloads on GPUs and know what it takes to build reliable systems on top of GPU cloud providers. - Kubernetes and EKS depth, including routing and scheduling. You're comfortable designing how work gets placed across a fleet, and writing the services that make it happen. - Deep AWS experience. You're at home spinning up new services and turning them into simple, repeatable processes others can build on. - A senior track record of ownership. You've set technical direction, made decisions others built on, and carried ambiguous work over the finish line. You explain complex ideas clearly, to engineers and non-engineers alike. Nice to have - Experience with GCP - Experience with video streaming infrastructure - Experience with training infrastructure or LLM serving - Experience with SOC2 or security compliance If you don't check every box but this sounds like the work you want to be doing, apply anyway.