Senior Full Stack Engineer, Solve Voice

Zendesk Zendesk · Enterprise · Austin, TX +4

This role focuses on building the backend services for a real-time voice AI product, emphasizing latency, reliability, and observability. It involves integrating with telephony, WebRTC, audio processing, and external AI/speech services to improve conversation flow and enable AI-driven support. The engineer will also ship end-to-end product features and address real-time interaction challenges.

What you'd actually do

  1. Design and implement backend services powering real-time voice conversations, focusing on latency, reliability, and observability.
  2. Build integrations for telephony, WebRTC, real-time audio processing, and external AI/speech services.
  3. Ship end-to-end product features across backend systems and user-facing web experiences when required.
  4. Improve platform reliability and performance: monitoring, tracing, autoscaling, and failure recovery.
  5. Address real-time interaction challenges such as turn-taking, interruptions, responsiveness, and graceful handoff to humans.

Skills

Required

  • Solid backend fundamentals
  • experience designing APIs
  • async systems
  • scalable integrations
  • Hands-on experience with real-time systems (WebRTC, WebSockets) or telephony protocols
  • Product-driven engineering mindset
  • Ability to debug and optimize latency and reliability issues in production systems
  • 3+ years building production software
  • significant backend engineering experience
  • Experience with real-time or event-driven systems (WebRTC, SIP, streaming APIs)
  • Proficiency in Python or equivalent backend languages and async architectures

Nice to have

  • Experience with telephony stacks, SIP, media servers, or speech/ASR/TTS integrations
  • Familiarity with LLMs, speech models, or conversational AI production infrastructure
  • Experience on fullstack teams shipping both backend and frontend user experiences
  • Expertise in diagnosing performance and reliability issues under real-time constraints

What the JD emphasized

  • real-time voice AI product
  • latency
  • reliability
  • observability
  • real-time audio processing
  • external AI/speech services
  • real-time interaction challenges
  • real-time systems
  • real-time constraints

Other signals

  • real-time voice AI product
  • reduce latency
  • improve conversation flow
  • AI-driven support
  • real-time audio processing
  • external AI/speech services
  • conversational AI production infrastructure