Software Engineer, Voice AI

About this role

ABOUT THE ROLE

Join a small, high-velocity Y Combinator-backed robotics AI startup building the "social brain" that enables humanoid robots to listen, speak, and operate naturally alongside people. As a Software Engineer on the Voice AI team, you'll own cloud-side systems that sit at the heart of real-world robot deployments — where low latency, robust pipelines, and production reliability are non-negotiable. This is a high-ownership, on-site role in San Francisco for engineers who want their work to ship to real robots in the field.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

- Design and develop cloud-side systems that help robots intelligently understand and respond to people in real time.

- Use production humanoid robots to evaluate and test new features in real-world settings.

- Iterate on software deployed to customer robots operating in the field.

- Improve composite voice pipelines using state-of-the-art speech and language models.

- Add and enhance features including knowledge storage/retrieval, smarter turn-taking logic, and automatic personality tuning.

- Reduce interaction latency and make human-robot conversations feel more natural.

- Maintain cloud backend code primarily written in Python 3.14 and work with a custom UDP-based streaming protocol.

- Deploy and operate services at edge locations across GCP and AWS.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

Must-haves:

- 3+ years of professional software engineering experience delivering cloud-based features.

- Demonstrated experience with Voice AI development and pipelines.

- Experience with latency-sensitive real-time media pipelines (e.g., voice, streaming, games).

- Experience building knowledge storage/retrieval components and dialog turn-taking logic for voice AI.

- Experience delivering software deployed to customer-facing robots or devices in real-world environments.

- Strong cloud development background with AWS or GCP and Kubernetes-based production deployments.

- Proficiency in Python for backend services; familiarity with UDP-based streaming protocols.

- Experience deploying and operating services at edge locations.

- Observability-focused mindset — experience instrumenting systems with metrics and monitoring tools (e.g., Prometheus/Grafana, distributed tracing).

- Strong CI/CD practices: linting, testing, packaging, and automation.

Nice to haves:

- Experience with containerization and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Helm).

- Latency optimization and performance tuning for real-time systems.

- Deep knowledge of speech processing and voice pipeline architectures.

- Robotics hardware integration experience (e.g., ROS) or familiarity with humanoid robots.

COMPENSATION & BENEFITS

- Salary: $150,000 – $225,000 USD annually, depending on experience.

- Visa sponsorship is available.

LOCATION

This is an on-site role based in San Francisco, California, USA. Remote work is not available for this position.

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