Software Engineer, Voice AI

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.