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.