Staff Software Engineer, Voice Agent

Decagon; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 300,000 - 375,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, and vision benefits

Take what you need vacation policy

Daily lunches, dinners, and snacks in the office

Job summary

A leading conversational AI platform in California seeks a Staff Software Engineer focused on Voice Agent. This role involves owning the architecture of the voice runtime and leading improvements in speech understanding and audio quality. The ideal candidate will have over 8 years of engineering experience with technical leadership in real-time systems. Highly collaborative environment that offers competitive compensation of $300K to $375K along with equity and various benefits, including meals at the office.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of engineering experience with significant technical leadership.
• Expertise in real-time systems, streaming pipelines, or audio-based applications.
• Strong debugging skills across audio, networking, and model-driven systems.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture of the real-time voice runtime.
• Lead initiatives that improve speech understanding and synthesis quality.
• Define reliability and testing standards for live voice interactions.
• Mentor senior engineers and help expand the technical culture.

Skills

Technical leadership

Real-time systems

Debugging skills

Architectural direction

Mentoring engineers

Job description

Base pay range

$300,000.00/yr - $375,000.00/yr

About Decagon

Decagon is the leading conversational AI platform empowering every brand to deliver concierge customer experience. Our AI agents provide intelligent, human-like responses across chat, email, and voice, resolving millions of customer inquiries across every language and at any time.

Since coming out of stealth, Decagon has experienced rapid growth. We partner with industry leaders like Hertz, Eventbrite, Duolingo, Oura, Bilt, Curology, and Samsara to redefine customer experience at scale. We've raised over $200M from Bain Capital Ventures, Accel, a16z, BOND Capital, A*, Elad Gil, and notable angels such as the founders of Box, Airtable, Rippling, Okta, Lattice, and Klaviyo.

We’re an in-office company, driven by a shared commitment to excellence and velocity. Our values—customers are everything, relentless momentum, winner’s mindset, and stronger together—shape how we work and grow as a team.

About The Team

The Voice Agent team builds the real-time systems that allow Decagon agents to carry natural conversations across our omnichannels (phone, web, mobile, etc). We work across speech understanding, audio streaming, synthesis quality, and the voice specific execution logic that enables timing, pacing, and responsive dialogue.

Our systems must remain accurate, responsive, and stable at scale. Voice is one of the most technically challenging surfaces in conversational AI, and our small team owns this entire capability end-to-end.

About The Role

As a Staff Software Engineer focused on Voice Agent, you will lead the architecture and evolution of Decagon’s voice platform. You will drive multi-quarter projects that improve timing, responsiveness, audio quality, and reliability across millions of interactions.

You will collaborate with Research to integrate the next generation of speech models, with Infra to push the boundaries of latency and performance, and with Product to bring new voice capabilities to customers. You will help set engineering standards for voice, mentor senior engineers, and raise the technical bar for one of Decagon’s most important surfaces.

In this role

• Own the architecture of Decagon’s real-time voice runtime and shape its long-term roadmap
• Lead initiatives that improve speech understanding, synthesis quality, and conversational timing
• Define reliability, testing, and observability standards for live voice interactions
• Build frameworks that make voice systems easy to debug, measure, and iterate on
• Mentor senior engineers and help expand the technical culture of the Voice group

Your background

• 8+ years of engineering experience with significant technical leadership
• Expertise in real-time systems, streaming pipelines, or audio-based applications
• Ability to define architectural direction and lead cross-functional projects
• Strong debugging skills across audio, networking, and model-driven systems
• Experience mentoring engineers and influencing engineering standards

Even better

• Experience with speech recognition or synthesis systems
• Experience with VAD, streaming protocols, or other real-time audio systems
• Experience designing or maintaining LLM-driven applications
• Experience optimizing performance for low-latency use cases

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision benefits
• Take what you need vacation policy
• Daily lunches, dinners and snacks in the office to keep you at your best

Compensation

$300K – $375K + Offers Equity