Staff Software Engineer (Voice Agent)

Location: San Francisco, CA (On-site, 5 days/week)
Company Stage of Funding: Venture-backed (Raised $200M )
Office Type: In-office only
Salary: $300,000 – $375,000 Equity

Our client is a rapidly scaling conversational AI platform used by some of the world’s most recognizable consumer brands. Their AI agents deliver natural, human-like conversations across chat, email, and voice—resolving millions of customer inquiries across every language and industry.

The company has raised over $200M from top-tier investors and operates with a high-velocity, in-office culture built around excellence, ownership, and relentless momentum. They are redefining how global enterprises deliver customer experience through deeply capable AI systems.

You will join the Voice Agent group—a technically challenging surface responsible for real-time speech understanding, audio streaming, synthesis quality, and voice-specific conversational logic across omnichannel environments.

• Lead the architecture and long-term evolution of the real-time voice runtime.

• Own multi-quarter initiatives that improve timing, latency, responsiveness, and stability across millions of voice interactions.

• Drive improvements in speech understanding, synthesis quality, and conversational pacing.

• Define reliability, testing, observability, and debugging standards for live voice systems.

• Build frameworks and tooling that allow engineers to measure and iterate on voice performance.

• Partner closely with Research to integrate new speech models and with Infrastructure to push technical performance boundaries.

• Mentor senior engineers, set technical standards, and help scale the Voice engineering organization.

• 8 years of software engineering experience with meaningful technical leadership.

• Deep expertise in real-time systems, streaming pipelines, audio applications, or similar performance-critical architectures.

• Ability to define high-level architectural direction and lead complex cross-functional initiatives.

• Strong debugging skills across audio, networking, distributed systems, and model-driven pipelines.

• Experience mentoring engineers and influencing engineering culture and best practices.

• Experience with automatic speech recognition (ASR) or text-to-speech (TTS) systems.

• Familiarity with VAD, audio streaming protocols, or real-time audio frameworks.

• Experience building or optimizing LLM-driven applications.

• Expertise designing systems for ultra-low-latency, high-reliability environments.

• Base Salary: $300,000 – $375,000

• Equity: Competitive

• Medical, dental, and vision benefits

• Flexible “take what you need” vacation policy

• Daily in-office lunches, dinners, and snacks

• High-growth environment with strong ownership and velocity