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Seattle, Washington, United States
Remote only
Tin Can is building a safer, simpler way for kids to connect — without smartphones. We’re creating screen-free, delightful devices and services that let families call the people who matter most, free from the noise of today’s digital world.
We’re building a bold, authentic, nostalgic, and kinda quirky brand that resonates with folks who want something simpler & better for their kids than the tech-infused lives we’re currently living (and who have a sense of humor about it). As we gear up to scale to thousands of families, we’re ready to bring on an engineer to help make it happen.
A Tin Can has exactly one job. A kid picks it up, and the person they want to talk to is on the other end — clear, and right away, every time. When that doesn’t happen we haven’t shipped a bug, we’ve broken the promise a family bought us for. There is no feature we could ship this year that matters more than getting this right.
We’re looking for a Senior Software Engineer to own that outcome end to end. Our calls run on FreeSWITCH and Kamailio in AWS, gated by a set of Lambda services, with an activation flow every family walks through the morning they open the box. You’ll own how that path is built, tested, deployed, and measured: defined as code, proven in staging before it reaches a kid’s phone, and instrumented so we see a problem the moment it starts. You’ll work alongside a VoIP specialist who owns the SIP and media plane itself, an SRE who owns the platform underneath, our firmware engineers, and the PM who owns reliability. Your job is the outcome across all of it, and you’ll go as deep as any layer requires.
Own the reliability outcome families actually experience — did the call connect, did it sound right, was the phone reachable — and the number we hold ourselves to
Make change management real for customer-visible behavior, so a migration that changes what a family hears is announced rather than discovered
Own the pipelines that carry an application or call-path change into production: reviewed, tested, and reversible
Own the staging tier as a real gate, where a change proves itself against production-like traffic before a kid’s phone sees it
Load-test the activation chain ahead of our holiday peak, so the busiest morning of the year is one we’ve already rehearsed
Build the product-outcome layer of our observability — the funnels and SLOs showing whether a call, voicemail, or activation actually succeeded — alongside the infrastructure metrics our SRE owns
Drive incidents to real root cause across the stack, from SIP signaling and media to Lambda services and Postgres
Own the incident-review practice: every class of failure gets an owner, a runbook, and a test that would catch it next time
Partner with our reliability PM to turn diagnosis into a backlog engineering can actually execute against
5+ years building and operating production backend or distributed systems where downtime is something real people notice
Real depth in AWS and infrastructure as code (we use Terraform), and a bias toward reproducibility
You’ve owned reliability as a discipline, not a fire drill — SLOs, meaningful alerting, load testing, and incident review that changes what gets built next
Comfortable in real-time and telephony systems, or genuinely eager to get there; SIP, RTP, and media behavior are the substrate here
Fluency using AI as a multiplier across diagnosis, analysis, and testing
Hands-on and scrappy; you’d rather run the load test or read the SIP trace yourself than wait on someone else
A clear communicator who writes things down
A collaborative, low-ego approach — everyone here sweeps the floor
Bonus: production FreeSWITCH, Kamailio, or carrier SIP trunking; load-testing a system through a seasonal peak; Postgres at scale; operating a consumer hardware fleet; or observability tooling like Grafana
We’re building tech that protects childhood: We’re on a quest to give kids a more analog childhood — one with real conversations, real connection, and way less screen time. No doomscrolling, data mining, or dopamine traps — just a simpler, better way for kids to stay in touch. This is a rare opportunity to build something that truly matters.
You’ll own the promise the whole company is judged on: Reliability is our top priority this year, and this is the engineering role that owns it. You’ll set the technical direction for how a Tin Can stays dependable as we scale.
Small, high-trust team: Every company says “team,” but at Tin Can it means something different. We’re a small, mission-driven group that genuinely has each other’s backs — professionally and personally. You’ll be joining a tight-knit crew where your ideas and instincts matter from day one.
Room to explore, not just execute: You’ll have the space to explore new ideas, challenge assumptions, and build systems that reflect our values of trust, simplicity, and care.
If you’re excited by the idea of making a kid’s phone call something their family never has to think about, we’d love to meet you.
