Senior Software Engineer — Robot Voice AI (Hybrid/Remote)

Cerence; California; On-site; USD 107,000 - 172,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Insurance coverage (medical, dental, &

Annual bonus opportunity

Paid time off

Company 401(k) matching

Equity awards

Remote and/or hybrid work options

Job summary

Cerence AI is hiring a Senior Software Engineer to drive the application and cognitive layer for humanoid robots. You will turn human intent into high-level robotic actions, building advanced voice applications, multi-modal context systems, and core business logic.

Join a team of robotics, AI, cloud, and embedded systems experts to deliver interactive, reliable robot experiences in real-world environments. Location: California Bay Area.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Robotics, Software Engineering, AI, or related discipline.
• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience using Python and/or C++.
• Experience with API-driven systems, distributed services, and event-driven architectures.
• Experience optimizing software on resource-constrained edge hardware.
• Experience integrating cloud AI services, model serving platforms, and containerized deployments.
• Automated testing, debugging, monitoring, observability, and CI/CD practices.
• Experience in human-robot interaction and designing context-aware experiences.

Responsibilities

• Application Layer & Business Logic: Implement high-level application software, interaction workflows, and robotic behavioral state machines.
• Intent-to-Action Orchestration: Build core logic translating speech, gestures and context into robotic tasks.
• Multi-Modal Interaction Fusion: Integrate vision, scene understanding, spatial tracking, and voice interactions for contextual awareness.
• Voice Application Engineering: Develop voice apps with STT, NLU, dialog management, wake-word, and TTS interfaces.
• Agentic AI Development: Build orchestration using LLMs, VLMs, tool-calling, memory, and reasoning engines.
• Robot Capability Integration: Consume navigation, manipulation, perception, and device-control services.
• Edge/Cloud Partitioning: Balance low-latency local execution with cloud AI services.
• Multi-Device & Ecosystem Integrations: Connect robots with mobile devices, smart homes, and cloud APIs.
• Data Loop Contribution: Build telemetry, logging, and evaluation mechanisms for model improvement.
• Deployment & Production Readiness: Contribute to testing, observability, CI/CD, and production deployment.

Skills

BehaviorTree.CPP

LLMs & VLMs

Python/C++

API-driven architectures

Edge computing

Cloud AI services

CI/CD

Human-robot interaction

Education

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Robotics, Software Engineering, AI, or related discipline

Tools

ROS2

Docker

Kubernetes

Job description

Cerence AI is hiring a Senior Software Engineer to drive the application and cognitive layer for humanoid robots. You will turn human intent into high-level robotic actions, building advanced voice applications, multi-modal context systems, and core business logic.

Join a team of robotics, AI, cloud, and embedded systems experts to deliver interactive, reliable robot experiences in real-world environments. Location: California Bay Area.