Ava

Making communication barriers disappear

La, ny, remote, sf, silicon valley, east bay, seattle

26 - 50 employees

11 - 25 engineers

$5m - $10m funding

Series a

Apply

We want to radically improve how we humans communicate with each other. Our core mission at Ava is to empower 466M deaf and hard-of-hearing people to live in a fully accessible world. Every day, millions of people are excluded from conversations because they cannot hear what others say well. Our CEO Thibault grew up in a Deaf family & witnessed firsthand how the world was not accessible for them. Together with our CTO Skinner — deaf since age 2 — Thibault co-founded Ava to make live captioning of conversations as easy as turning on captions on TV.

Our small but fast-growing team has reinvented AI-based speech recognition technology to be in service of people who need it the most. We dream of a 24/7 accessible world, without any communication barrier. In this pursuit, we're seeing how critical communication skills are, yet very far from ideal, to unleash our collective potential. This is for us the ultimate barrier we need to lift.

Our belief is that well-designed technology can help everyone communicate and connect better — much more effectively & authentically — so humanity can achieve the greatest things together.

Why join us?

Innovation! We are REALLY using tech for good and making an impact on our user's life.
We've just closed a new round of fundraising, and we're growing our Product & Engineering team
and you might just like it ;)

Engineering at Ava

Engineering team and processes

We have our Product & Engineering team in US and our AI Lab in France. Every engineer is using one-third of their time to work on architectural & deep engineering work (no direct user impact). Our sprint cycle is 1 or 2 weeks. To make sure we are at the same page — we have the weekly sync meeting between Product and AI teams.

In Mobile development, since there's only 1 Android developer and 1 iOS developer, so we just rely on GitHub Actions with Fastlane to do the CD, CI is on-going. In Web development, we have 2 Web developers and we use Pull Requests to do the code review and GitHub actions to deploy. In Backend development, we also rely on Pull Requests to do the code review but we use Jenkins to do CI, we manually deploy Backend using AWS cli. The release of Mobile, Web is every 1-2 weeks, but it's 1 week for Backend. Ideally, the Engineering Lead should uniform above and let all platform obey the uniform process — we will 100% leverage GitHub Actions.

We are still growing up our Product & Engineering team. We are hiring these positions in the US: Engineering Lead (who will need to do Backend engineering), FullStack engineer, Product Designer and QA Engineer.

Technical Challenges

We are refactoring our Infrastructure and Stack that we can optimize the transcripts delay between every user no matter where he is in US or EU or anywhere.

We are also rebuilding AI engineering to make sure the Backend and the related infrastructure can let our AI team be able to perform AI to gain the accuracy.

Projects you might work on

Build a better Desktop app which can exist like the daemon which we can use it to Caption any music or video we play in the PC, and also can adapt any Video meetings or the Phone call in the PC.
Re-construct the Infrastructure and Stack for letting our Product can stand up with better performance (low-delay and high-accurate transcripts), and the environment where AI team can perform AI to improve or create better transcripts without a lot dependencies (human or devices).
We will develop our Glass + AR , so you can see who is speaking via your Glass and the transcript will be attached via AR.

Tech stack

Node.js

React

Working at Ava

Hands on dreamers! With singularity and acceptation. No micro management and always looking to improve ourselves

Diversity and Inclusion

We are an accessibility company made originally by and for deaf and hard-of-hearing people. We believe that together we're stronger, and diversity is a strength!

You will see :)

You'll feel welcome to the family, and we encourage you to continue in any side projects or activities that make you grow professionally or personally.

Connect with our team during your hiring process

As part of our commitment to an inclusive workplace, we are happy to offer prospective engineers the chance to connect with our engineering employees who come from underrepresented backgrounds. It’s a way to get a better sense of our team and what it might be like to work with us.

If you’re interested in connecting with our team, be sure to bring this up during one of our introductory calls!

Perks & benefits