Senior Backend Engineer, Real-Time Voice AI

Zendesk; Madison (WI); Hybrid; USD 145,000 - 217,000; Full time

Job summary

Zendesk in the United States is seeking a Senior Full Stack Engineer to build the real-time voice AI product that powers live conversations. You will design backend services, integrate telephony, WebRTC, and external AI/speech services, and ship features across backend and frontend when needed.

You should have 3+ years of production software experience, strong Python skills, and hands-on work with real-time systems.

Qualifications

• 3+ years building production software, with significant backend engineering experience.
• Experience with real-time or event-driven systems (WebRTC, SIP, streaming APIs).
• Proficiency in Python or equivalent backend languages and async architectures.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement backend services powering real-time voice conversations.
• Build integrations for telephony, WebRTC, real-time audio processing, and external AI/speech services.
• Ship end-to-end product features across backend systems and user-facing web experiences when required.
• Improve platform reliability and performance: monitoring, tracing, autoscaling, and failure recovery.
• Address real-time interaction challenges such as turn-taking, interruptions, responsiveness, and graceful handoff to humans.
• Partner with product and design to deliver voice experiences that feel polished and human.

Skills

Real-time systems

API design

Latency optimization

Cross-functional collaboration

Async programming

Tools

Python

WebRTC

WebSockets

SIP

Job description

Zendesk in the United States is seeking a Senior Full Stack Engineer to build the real-time voice AI product that powers live conversations. You will design backend services, integrate telephony, WebRTC, and external AI/speech services, and ship features across backend and frontend when needed.

You should have 3+ years of production software experience, strong Python skills, and hands-on work with real-time systems.