Staff Software Engineer, Voice Agent

About DecagonDecagon 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 TeamThe 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 RoleAs 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, you willOwn the architecture of Decagon’s real-time voice runtime and shape its long-term roadmapLead initiatives that improve speech understanding, synthesis quality, and conversational timingDefine reliability, testing, and observability standards for live voice interactionsBuild frameworks that make voice systems easy to debug, measure, and iterate onMentor senior engineers and help expand the technical culture of the Voice groupYour background looks something like this8+ years of engineering experience with significant technical leadershipExpertise in real-time systems, streaming pipelines, or audio-based applicationsAbility to define architectural direction and lead cross-functional projectsStrong debugging skills across audio, networking, and model-driven systemsExperience mentoring engineers and influencing engineering standardsEven betterExperience with speech recognition or synthesis systemsExperience with VAD, streaming protocols, or other real-time audio systemsExperience designing or maintaining LLM-driven applicationsExperience optimizing performance for low-latency use casesBenefits:Medical, dental, and vision benefitsTake what you need vacation policyDaily lunches, dinners and snacks in the office to keep you at your bestCompensation$300K – $375K + Offers Equity