Position SummaryThe Software Engineer III - Voice AI is responsible for building and maintaining the real-time conversational AI systems that power Natera's automated patient call center. This role requires strong expertise in TypeScript and Node.js, hands-on experience with voice AI pipelines (STT, LLM orchestration, TTS), and familiarity with telephony systems, agentic architectures, and event-driven design. You should be comfortable working with real-time audio streaming, WebSocket protocols, and the unique latency and UX challenges of voice-based AI. You'll collaborate with cross-functional teams in a fast-paced environment to ship features that measurably improve call efficacy and patient satisfaction.
Primary ResponsibilitiesLead- Take ownership of assigned voice AI features and components, guiding them through the full software development lifecycle.
- Contribute to design discussions, code reviews, and best practice adoption within the Voice AI team.
- Drive technical decisions on voice pipeline optimization - VAD tuning, turn-taking, interruption handling, and latency management.
Manage- Plan and prioritize tasks in an Agile environment, ensuring timely and high-quality delivery.
- Work with Product Managers and stakeholders to refine requirements and scope technical efforts for conversational AI features.
- Monitor voice platform health metrics (call efficacy, ASR accuracy, per-segment latency) and prioritize improvements based on data.
Nurture- Mentor junior team members, sharing knowledge and best practices in voice AI architecture, TypeScript, and real-time systems.
- Encourage a culture of continuous learning and technical excellence through pair programming and design reviews.
- Document voice AI patterns, integration contracts, and operational runbooks for the team.
Collaborate- Partner with Product Managers, QA, and clinical operations to gather requirements, validate conversational designs, and guide projects from inception to deployment.
- Coordinate with other engineering teams to integrate voice agents with internal services via authenticated APIs.
- Work with the analytics team to ensure voice metrics flow correctly through the data pipeline for reporting and optimization.
Effect Change- Drive improvements in our multi-agent orchestration approach - tool calling patterns, agent handoff logic, and state management across conversation turns.
- Advocate for high-quality standards and automated testing strategies for conversational AI systems, including voice-specific test patterns (simulated calls, transcript validation, latency benchmarks).
- Identify and resolve voice-specific UX issues: ASR errors on medical terminology, silence detection tuning, barge-in recovery, and end-to-end response latency.
Qualifications- 5+ years of overall software development experience, focusing on scalable backend services using Node.js and TypeScript.
- 1+ years of experience with voice AI, conversational AI, or real-time audio systems in production.
- Hands-on experience with agentic LLM architectures - tool calling, multi-agent orchestration, prompt engineering, and conversation state management.
- Familiarity with voice AI pipeline components: STT (Deepgram, Azure Speech, OpenAI Whisper), TTS (ElevenLabs, OpenAI, Cartesia), and LLM APIs (OpenAI Realtime API, Anthropic Claude).
- Experience with telephony systems - Twilio (media streams, SIP, IVR) or equivalent WebSocket-based audio streaming platforms.
- Understanding of voice-specific challenges: VAD configuration, turn-taking, interruption handling, latency budgets, and audio codec management (mulaw/PCM).
- Solid understanding of the software development lifecycle (SDLC), including build, configuration, release, and deployment.
- Knowledge of microservice architecture and distributed systems best practices.
- Proficiency with AWS services (ECS Fargate, Lambda, DynamoDB, S3, Kafka/MSK, API Gateway).
- Experience with event-driven architecture and message processing (e.g., Apache Kafka, SQS).
- Strong relational database skills (MySQL) and exposure to NoSQL databases (DynamoDB, Redis).
- Demonstrated teamwork skills and a collaborative mindset.
- Excellent communication and organizational skills.
- Experience with RAG architectures (AWS Bedrock, vector stores, embedding models) is a plus.
Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities- Node.js/TypeScript: Proficiency with frameworks such as NestJS or Express; strong async/await and streaming patterns.
- Voice AI Pipeline: Understanding of end-to-end voice flow - telephony ingress, STT transcription, LLM processing, TTS synthesis, audio egress.
- Agentic Architecture: Experience with multi-agent systems, tool calling (OpenAI function calling, @openai/agents SDK or equivalent), agent handoffs, and conversation memory.
- Telephony: Twilio media streams, WebSocket audio streaming, SIP, IVR routing, call recording.
- LLM Integration: OpenAI Realtime API, Anthropic Claude, prompt engineering for conversational agents, structured outputs.
- Database Technologies: Strong SQL skills (MySQL) and exposure to NoSQL (DynamoDB, Redis/ElastiCache).
- AWS: ECS Fargate, Lambda, DynamoDB, S3, Kafka/MSK, API Gateway, Bedrock, CDK.
- Event Streaming: Apache Kafka for analytics pipelines; SQS for job queuing.
- Authentication: Okta JWT flows, OAuth2 client credentials, service-to-service auth patterns.
- Containerization: Docker, ECS task definitions, Fargate deployment.
- CI/CD: GitLab (or other pipelines) for continuous integration and deployment.
- Testing & QA: Familiarity with frameworks like Jest; experience testing conversational systems (transcript validation, simulated call flows).
- System Monitoring & Troubleshooting: Datadog APM, LLM Observability, or equivalent tools for latency tracking and voice pipeline health.
- Compliance: Awareness of HIPAA requirements for voice systems - PHI handling, zero-retention patterns, encrypted storage.
The pay range is listed and actual compensation packages are based on a wide array of factors unique to each candidate, including but not limited to skill set, years & depth of experience, certifications and specific office location. This may differ in other locations due to cost of labor considerations.
Remote USA
$105,700-$132,100 USD
