Senior Real-Time Voice AI Backend Engineer

Zendesk, Inc.; Austin (TX); Hybrid; USD 145,000 - 217,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work model

Remote work flexibility

Job summary

Zendesk, Inc. is seeking a Senior Full Stack Engineer to build the real-time voice AI product that makes live conversations feel natural and reliable.

You will design backend services powering real-time voice conversations, and ship end-to-end product features across backend systems and user-facing web experiences when required. This role emphasizes latency, observability, and seamless integration with telephony and AI services.

Qualifications

• 3+ years building production software with strong 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, focusing on latency, reliability, and observability.
• 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

Backend fundamentals

Real-time systems (WebRTC/WebSockets)

Async architectures

Python

Product-driven engineering

Cross-functional collaboration

Tools

Telephony stacks (SIP)

Media servers

Streaming APIs

WebRTC tooling

LLMs / speech models

Job description

Zendesk, Inc. is seeking a Senior Full Stack Engineer to build the real-time voice AI product that makes live conversations feel natural and reliable.

You will design backend services powering real-time voice conversations, and ship end-to-end product features across backend systems and user-facing web experiences when required. This role emphasizes latency, observability, and seamless integration with telephony and AI services.