Mark Backman
VP, Product at Daily
Atlanta, Georgia, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMark 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.
5 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
Github Skills (11)
speech-to-text10
text-to-speech10
openai10
python10
restful-api9
rest-api9
api-rest9
api8
apim8
api-design8
software-design8
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
pipecat-ai/pipecat
Apr 2024 - Apr 2025
Open Source framework for voice and multimodal conversational AI
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:545 reviews, 443 PRs, 591 pushes in 11 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.
aichatbot-frameworkchatbotsreal-timevoice
pipecat-ai/pipecat-flows
Nov 2024 - Apr 2025
Open source conversation framework and visual editor for structured Pipecat dialogues
Contributions:13 releases, 42 reviews, 138 PRs in 4 months
aiconversational-aireal-time
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