Fullstack Engineer- Contract
Slang
Software Engineering
South America
Posted on Aug 28, 2025
Company Summary:
Slang.ai is redefining customer engagement through conversational AI, making every interaction seamless and efficient. Our mission is to transform the restaurant industry by providing the ultimate voice AI solution for consistently outstanding customer experiences. At Slang.ai, we foster a culture of innovation, inclusivity, and growth, ensuring that every "Slangsta" (employee) feels valued and connected to our broader AI driven impact.
What Your Experience Will Be:
You'll join Slang's Engineering team as a Full Stack Software Engineer (contractor), working as part of a new Integrations pod focused on building seamless connections with third-party reservation systems. Your work will enable restaurants to connect their existing reservation platforms with Slang's conversational AI solutions, creating a unified experience for booking reservations and events. You'll spend roughly 70% of your time developing robust backend services in Kotlin to handle these integrations, with the remaining 30% contributing to React/TypeScript frontend features for configuration and monitoring. Your work will directly impact thousands of restaurant interactions daily, helping businesses automate bookings and improve customer service through natural conversation while leveraging their existing technology investments.
You'll report to the Engineering Manager, collaborating closely with product managers, conversation designers, and fellow engineers. The role requires 4+ hours of daily overlap with EST (12:30-4:30 PM ET), with attendance at key ceremonies including daily standups at 1:00 PM ET, bi-weekly cycle planning, and weekly Show & Tell sessions. As a remote contractor, you'll use modern collaboration tools like Slack, GitHub, and video conferencing to stay connected with the team. Once ramped up, you'll have opportunities to mentor junior and other mid-level engineers through code reviews and pair programming sessions.
Why You Belong Here & How You Will Grow:
Our engineering culture emphasizes pragmatic solutions, continuous learning, and collaborative problem-solving. We believe in domain-driven design, comprehensive testing, and building systems that gracefully handle the complexities of real-world restaurant operations. You'll work alongside engineers who are passionate about creating reliable, scalable conversational experiences and who regularly share knowledge through Show & Tell sessions and detailed technical documentation. As a contractor, you'll gain exposure to cutting-edge conversational AI technologies, telephony systems at scale, and modern cloud-native architectures. You'll deepen your expertise in Kotlin and functional programming while working with production systems handling real-time voice interactions. The cross-functional nature of the role—spanning backend, frontend, and AI integrations—will accelerate your growth toward senior engineering roles. You'll learn from experienced engineers while contributing your own perspectives to architectural decisions and technical standards.
What Success Looks Like
- Design and implement scalable Kotlin backend services following domain-driven design principles, with comprehensive error handling and testing
- Develop and maintain GraphQL APIs that efficiently serve both internal and external clients
- Build React/TypeScript frontend components that provide intuitive interfaces for restaurant staff and customers
- Create robust integrations with Twilio telephony services and Dialogflow conversational AI, handling edge cases and failure scenarios gracefully
- Design efficient Firestore data models that balance performance, cost, and maintainability
- Implement comprehensive observability including logging, metrics, tracing, and actionable alerting
- Deliver production-ready code with appropriate test coverage (unit, integration, and end-to-end tests)
- Participate actively in code reviews, providing constructive feedback and incorporating suggestions
- Document technical decisions, API contracts, and system architecture clearly
- Deploy containerized applications to Google Cloud Platform following cloud-native best practices
- Collaborate effectively with cross-functional teams to refine requirements and deliver features that meet business needs
- Contribute to technical design discussions and help establish coding standards and best practices
What you will Bring
- 3-5 years of professional software development experience with full stack applications
- Strong proficiency in at least one JVM language (Kotlin, Java, or Scala) with understanding of functional programming concepts
- Experience building and consuming RESTful or GraphQL APIs
- Hands-on experience with React and TypeScript for frontend development
- Familiarity with NoSQL databases and data modeling concepts
- Experience with containerization (Docker) and cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
- Strong understanding of software testing practices and test-driven development
- Excellent debugging and troubleshooting skills across the full stack
- Ability to work independently and manage time effectively in a remote environment
- Strong written and verbal communication skills for remote collaboration
- Available for 40 hours per week with 4+ hours daily overlap with EST
- Experience with Kotlin specifically and its idioms
- Familiarity with GraphQL schema design and implementation
- Experience with Google Cloud Platform services (Firestore, Cloud Functions, Pub/Sub)
- Knowledge of telephony systems (Twilio or similar) and webhook integrations
- Experience with conversational AI platforms (Dialogflow, Lex, or similar)
- Infrastructure as code experience with Terraform
- Understanding of event-driven architectures and distributed systems patterns
- Experience with observability tools and practices (structured logging, distributed tracing)
- Previous experience in a contractor or consultant role
- Interest in restaurant/hospitality technology domain
Preferred Qualifications:
Core Responsibilities & Technical Standards
- Design and implement backend services using Kotlin and the JVM ecosystem (primary focus)
- Develop GraphQL queries and mutations for client-server communication
- Contribute to React frontend components and features as needed
- Create modular, testable code following domain-driven design principles
- Implement proper error handling, logging, and graceful degradation patterns
- Write comprehensive unit and integration tests across the stack
- Data Modeling and Storage
- Design and implement Firestore data models that optimize for performance and maintainability
- Create efficient data access patterns and queries
- Implement data migration scripts and schema evolution strategies
- Ensure data consistency and integrity across distributed systems
- Design GraphQL schemas that effectively represent domain models
- Telephony and AI Integrations
- Develop and maintain integrations with Twilio for voice and messaging capabilities
- Implement Dialogflow conversational flows and webhook handlers
- Create fault-tolerant communication between telephony providers and internal services
- Handle edge cases and error scenarios in telephony workflows
- Implement retry logic and circuit breaker patterns for external service calls
- Frontend Development (as needed)
- Implement React components using TypeScript
- Integrate frontend with GraphQL APIs
- Ensure responsive and accessible UI implementations
- Write unit tests for React components
- Collaborate with product team on user experience improvements
- Cloud Services Integration
- Develop containerized applications using Docker
- Deploy and manage services on Google Cloud Platform
- Ensure services follow cloud-native best practices for scalability and resilience
- Integrate with GCP services (Cloud Functions, Pub/Sub, etc.) as required
- Provision new infrastructure using Terraform as needed under the guidance of platform engineering
- Observability and Monitoring
- Implement comprehensive logging, metrics, and tracing
- Create dashboards and alerts for service health monitoring
- Develop diagnostic tools to aid in troubleshooting production issues
- Ensure all services provide actionable insights into their behavior and performance
- Follow Kotlin idioms and best practices for backend development
- Use TypeScript effectively with proper type safety for frontend work
- Use dependency injection and maintain loose coupling
- Write self-documenting code with meaningful variable and function names
- Maintain consistent code formatting using agreed-upon linter
Technical Standards
How Work Affects My Life:
This contractor position offers the flexibility of remote work with competitive hourly compensation commensurate with mid-level engineering market rates. You'll have the autonomy to structure your 40-hour work week while maintaining core collaboration hours with the team. The role provides an opportunity to work on meaningful technology that directly impacts small business owners and their customers, helping restaurants thrive through innovative conversational AI solutions. Through this role, you'll gain valuable experience working with enterprise-grade systems and modern AI technologies, positioning you for future senior engineering opportunities. The exposure to production telephony systems, conversational AI, and scalable cloud architectures will expand your technical portfolio and worldview on how technology can transform traditional industries. You'll be part of building solutions that make restaurant operations more efficient and customer experiences more delightful, contributing to the digital transformation of the hospitality industry.
Our Vision
Calling a business shouldn’t feel like a robot-hostage situation, where you’re forced to listen to horrible music and can't reach a human, while enduring a soulless voice uttering "I'm sorry I didn't quite get that" on repeat for eternity. (shudder) That’s why we started Slang.ai. We use the latest AI and audio wizardry to make transacting via voice so enjoyable it’s more human than human. By 2030, we will save businesses and consumers 1 billion minutes of precious time while transforming voice channels into the preferred mode of communication (it's faster and easier than text).
We have backgrounds building product at companies like Spotify, Buzzfeed, the New York Times, and OpenTable —shipping experiences that have reached hundreds of millions of users. Now, we’re using our backgrounds to start a new culture, one that puts product and human-centered design above all else while fostering constant learning and growth. Sound like something you’d like to be part of? Get on board.
Our Values
Overachiever Fever. We’re overachievers (we don’t know any other way)
Learner Fervor. We take every opportunity to learn (especially when it’s hard)
Humility Ability. We approach each other with curiosity and openness (know-it-alls not welcome!)
SMB MVP. We’re an expert member of our customers’ teams (we earn their trust)