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
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Design and develop cloud-side systems that help robots intelligently understand and respond to people in real time.
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Use production humanoid robots to evaluate and test new features in real-world settings.
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Iterate on software deployed to customer robots operating in the field.
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Improve composite voice pipelines using state-of-the-art speech and language models.
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Add and enhance features including knowledge storage/retrieval, smarter turn-taking logic, and automatic personality tuning.
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Reduce interaction latency and make human-robot conversations feel more natural.
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Maintain cloud backend code primarily written in Python 3.14 and work with a custom UDP-based streaming protocol.
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Deploy and operate services at edge locations across GCP and AWS.
What We're Looking For
Must-haves:
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3+ years of professional software engineering experience delivering cloud-based features.
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Demonstrated experience with Voice AI development and pipelines.
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Experience with latency-sensitive real-time media pipelines (e.g., voice, streaming, games).
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Experience building knowledge storage/retrieval components and dialog turn-taking logic for voice AI.
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Experience delivering software deployed to customer-facing robots or devices in real-world environments.
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Strong cloud development background with AWS or GCP and Kubernetes-based production deployments.
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Proficiency in Python for backend services; familiarity with UDP-based streaming protocols.
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Experience deploying and operating services at edge locations.
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Observability-focused mindset — experience instrumenting systems with metrics and monitoring tools (e.g., Prometheus/Grafana, distributed tracing).
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Strong CI/CD practices: linting, testing, packaging, and automation.
Nice to haves:
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Experience with containerization and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Helm).
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Latency optimization and performance tuning for real-time systems.
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Deep knowledge of speech processing and voice pipeline architectures.
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Robotics hardware integration experience (e.g., ROS) or familiarity with humanoid robots.
Compensation & Benefits
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Salary: $150,000 – $225,000 USD annually, depending on experience.
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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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