Mark Backman is a product-focused software leader with 15+ years of engineering and go-to-market experience, currently serving as VP of Product at Daily in Atlanta. He combines a systems engineering background from Boeing and Raytheon with hands-on sales engineering and product leadership at Oblong, translating complex technical requirements into iterative, data-driven product roadmaps. Mark contributes to open-source conversational AI tooling—improving TTS quality and LLM parameter controls in the pipecat framework—showing he still ships code alongside shaping strategy. Known for driving rapid experimentation informed by analytics and user studies, he excels at aligning cross-functional teams to deliver continuous user value.
6 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
B.S., B.S. at Columbia University in the City of New York
Open Source framework for voice agents, multimodal apps, and realtime AI. Maintained by Daily and the community.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:3 releases, 1571 reviews, 1066 PRs in 2 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Mark's contributions primarily involved enhancing text-to-speech (TTS) services within the pipecat framework, focusing on audio generation functionality. Their work included adding sample rate settings to the OpenAI TTS services to control the quality of speech output, as well as integrating similar settings for Azure, PlayHT, and ElevenLabs TTS services. Additionally, the user introduced input parameters to the Anthropic, Together AI, and OpenAI LLM services to fine-tune model behavior, along with parameter options for Google, Azure, and AWS TTS services.
Contributions:13 releases, 5 reviews, 29 PRs in 7 months
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