About the RoleJoin 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 ForMust-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.
LocationThis is an
on-site role based in
San Francisco, California, USA. Remote work is not available for this position.
