Staff Software Engineer, Voice Agent
Decagon
Location
San Francisco
Employment Type
Full time
Department
Engineering, Product & Design
Compensation
- Base Salary $250K – $375K • Offers Equity
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, you will
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 looks something like this
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 – $385K + Offers Equity
Compensation Range: $250K - $375K