Principal Robot AI Engineer: Voice, Vision & Apps (Remote)

Cerence AI; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 166,000 - 264,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Annual bonus

Medical, dental, vision insurance

Paid time off

Paid holidays

Equity awards

Remote/hybrid work option

Job summary

Cerence is seeking a Principal Software Engineer for Robot Applications & Voice AI in the California Bay Area. You will shape the cognitive layer for humanoid robots, turning human intent into actionable tasks and building multi-modal AI systems that interact naturally with people and the environment.

You will work with experts in Voice AI, Agentic AI, and robotics, delivering robust software across edge devices and cloud services.

Qualifications

• Must have strong software engineering experience with Python and/or C++.
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Responsibilities

• Implement high-level application software and robotic behavioral state machines.
• Translate speech, gestures, and context into robotic tasks.
• Integrate vision, scene understanding, and voice interactions for context.
• Develop voice applications handling STT, NLU, dialog management, wake-word, and TTS.
• Build orchestration workflows with LLMs, VLMs, memory, tool-calling, and reasoning.
• Integrate navigation, manipulation, perception, and device control services.
• Balance edge and cloud execution for latency and reliability.
• Collaborate across robotics, AI, cloud, and embedded teams.
• Contribute to testing, observability, and CI/CD in production.

Skills

BehaviorTree.CPP

Cognitive AI

Python

C++

API-driven architecture

Edge computing

Cloud AI services

CI/CD

Human-Robot Interaction

Education

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in CS/Robotics/AI

Tools

ROS2

Docker

Kubernetes

Job description

Cerence is seeking a Principal Software Engineer for Robot Applications & Voice AI in the California Bay Area. You will shape the cognitive layer for humanoid robots, turning human intent into actionable tasks and building multi-modal AI systems that interact naturally with people and the environment.

You will work with experts in Voice AI, Agentic AI, and robotics, delivering robust software across edge devices and cloud services.