Senior Software Engineer - Desktop (Rust/Tauri)

About Read AI:

At Read AI we’re redefining how teams collaborate by bringing intelligence to every conversation. Our platform supercharges productivity across meetings, messages, and email, so work gets done faster, smarter, and with better focus. We integrate seamlessly with tools like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, Slack, and more, helping teams stay aligned and move forward, whether they’re in the same room or across time zones.

Backed by $81 million in funding from Smash Capital, Madrona, and Goodwater Capital, Read AI is growing. If you're excited to shape the future of AI-powered collaboration and want to make an impact at a product-focused startup, we’d love to meet you.

The Role:

Our desktop application today captures meeting audio and surfaces transcripts and reports. Our intent is to turn it into the control center for Read meetings - where people prepare beforehand, capture during, and generate outcomes after, in one unified experience.

The app is built in Rust with Tauri, with a React frontend, and the hardest problems live at the boundary with the operating system: system audio capture across two very different permission and device models, on-device processing, connections to external hardware for better capture quality, and the release path that keeps installed software healthy on real users' machines.

You'll work directly with product and design to ship roadmap features, and you'll be a critical part of the deeper R&D that determines what's possible. Part of your job is showing product what the local machine makes viable - the things we can't build on web or mobile alone.

What You'll Do:

• Build the unified desktop experience: Ship features that make preparing, capturing, and reviewing meetings feel like one seamless flow.
• Implement the desktop side of our cross-app UI unification so Read looks and behaves like one product everywhere.
• Create a seamless cohesive experience that gets complexity out of the way of users so they can focus on their outcomes.
• Own the native layer: Expand meeting capture across Windows and macOS, treating both as first-class platforms.
• Investigate and prototype on-device transcription and audio processing.
• Collect additional signals to strengthen our AI capabilities.
• Connect to external devices to improve capture quality.
• Raise the bar on the codebase: Write Rust that stays fast to work in — clear structure, strong tests, and interfaces that hold up as the app grows.
• Set the patterns and conventions that make the codebase productive for engineers and AI agents alike.
• Own release quality end to end: signing, notarization, auto-update, crash telemetry.
• Shape what gets built: Bring technical vision to roadmap conversations - what's possible on desktop that isn't possible elsewhere.
• Partner with product and design from problem definition, not just implementation.
• Contribute to how the team ships, using AI to make rigor efficient rather than slow.

What We're Looking For:

• 5+ years building software professionally, with meaningful time on desktop or client applications.
• Have shipped installed software to real users on Windows, macOS, or both - and supported it after launch.
• Working proficiency in Rust, or deep systems experience in a comparable language and genuine appetite for Rust.
• Comfortable across the native/web boundary - able to work in React and TypeScript without treating it as someone else's job.
• Practical knowledge of OS-level concerns: permissions, device access, background processes, packaging and distribution.
• Authorized to work in the US - we're not able to sponsor visas for this role.

Nice to Have:

• Audio capture, DSP, or real-time media pipeline experience.
• Tauri, or comparable hybrid frameworks.
• On-device ML or local inference work.
• Hardware or peripheral integration experience.

Why This Role Matters:

Most meeting tools live in a browser tab, which puts a hard ceiling on what they can do. Desktop is where that ceiling comes off — the machine has access to