Hybrid Voice AI Engineering Principal

Posted last month

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About the role

  • Voice AI Engineering Principal overseeing the development and deployment of voice AI technologies at Zendesk. Leading a high-performing team to shape voice-enabled customer experiences.

Responsibilities

  • Define the technical vision and architect the next generation of our voice-first AI Agent platform
  • Own and drive complex, multi-quarter technical initiatives from concept to production
  • Lead the design and development of critical, real-time voice components
  • Establish and enforce engineering best practices, design patterns, and coding standards for Python-based voice agent development
  • Provide technical leadership and guidance to a dedicated project team
  • Actively mentor Senior and mid-level engineers
  • Serve as the primary technical partner for Product Leadership, ML Science, and Infrastructure teams
  • Design, establish, and continuously improve the organizational platforms and methodologies for evaluating voice agent performance and behavior
  • Architect and implement advanced safety and reliability mechanisms

Requirements

  • 10+ years of progressive experience in software engineering
  • 4+ years focused on AI/ML applications
  • 2+ years operating in a Staff, Principal, or equivalent technical leadership capacity
  • Expertise in LLM-Oriented System Architecture
  • Mastery in Voice AI/Spoken Dialogue Systems
  • Extensive, hands-on experience building mission-critical, low-latency, streaming voice applications
  • Deep proficiency with integrating and managing real-time STT/TTS models and APIs
  • Advanced techniques for Voice Activity Detection (VAD) and noise suppression
  • Architecting robust barge-in and interruption logic in real-time voice streams
  • Deep expertise in deploying complex, large-scale AI applications to cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
  • Proven experience optimizing LLM token budgets, latency, and cost through sophisticated model routing, caching (e.g., Redis), and quantization techniques
  • Comprehensive understanding of foundational ML concepts, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines, vector databases, and advanced context management to ensure deterministic and accurate agent behavior in complex production environments
  • Expert-level proficiency in Python and modern web frameworks (e.g., FastAPI, gRPC for streaming services)

Benefits

  • Hybrid working arrangement
  • Professional development opportunities

Job title

Voice AI Engineering Principal

Job type

Experience level

Lead

Salary

Not specified

Degree requirement

Postgraduate Degree

Location requirements

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