Sr. Software Engineer – Robot Applications & Voice AI

Cerence•Remote - USA, CA

3d•$107,000 - $172,000

About The Position

The Sr. Software Engineer drives the application and cognitive layer of Cerence AI’s humanoid robot, working with the core robotics platform to translate human intent into high-level physical actions. The role focuses on advanced voice applications, multimodal context systems, business logic, and behavioral state machines that make the robot interactive, helpful, and intuitive. The engineer develops application software and orchestration across Voice AI, Agentic AI, LLMs, VLMs, and robotic capabilities. Work includes integrating voice, vision, and environmental context; consuming robotics platform services; balancing edge and cloud execution; and connecting robots with devices, ecosystems, enterprise applications, and cloud APIs. The position also contributes to telemetry, evaluation, testing, observability, CI/CD, and production deployment.

Requirements

Strong proficiency in BehaviorTree.CPP, state machines, workflow orchestration engines, or task-planning architectures.
Hands-on experience building applications using LLMs, VLMs, tool-calling architectures, agent frameworks, RAG systems, or semantic memory platforms.
At least 5 years of professional software engineering experience using Python and/or C++.
Experience designing scalable application-layer software, API-driven systems, distributed services, and event-driven architectures.
Experience optimizing software on resource-constrained edge hardware under intermittent connectivity conditions.
Experience integrating cloud AI services, model-serving platforms, and containerized deployments.
Experience with automated testing, debugging, monitoring, observability, and CI/CD practices.
Experience designing natural, context-aware human-machine experiences.
Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Robotics, Software Engineering, AI, or a related discipline.

Nice To Haves

Experience with Cerence, Whisper, Deepgram, Azure Speech, ElevenLabs, AWS Speech Services, or other STT/TTS/NLU platforms.
Experience consuming robotics frameworks, including ROS2 application nodes, services, actions, topics, and navigation or manipulation APIs.
Experience with object detection, scene understanding, visual grounding, and spatial reasoning systems.
Experience with audio hardware integration, including beamforming, acoustic echo cancellation, microphone arrays, and noise suppression.
Experience building software for humanoids, service robots, warehouse automation, or embodied AI systems.
Experience with telemetry, analytics, evaluation systems, retraining pipelines, and AI feedback loops.
Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, OTA updates, and edge deployment environments.
Comfort owning solutions from concept through deployment in a fast-moving environment.

Responsibilities

Implement high-level application software, interaction workflows, and robotic behavioral state machines.
Build logic that translates speech, gestures, environmental cues, and contextual information into deterministic robotic tasks.
Integrate vision pipelines, object detection, scene understanding, spatial tracking, and voice interactions for contextual awareness.
Develop voice applications for speech-to-text, natural language understanding, dialog management, wake-word detection, and text-to-speech interfaces.
Build orchestration workflows combining LLMs, VLMs, memory systems, tool calling, reasoning engines, and robotic capabilities.
Consume and orchestrate navigation, manipulation, perception, and device-control services exposed by the robotics platform.
Optimize applications to balance low-latency local execution with cloud-based AI services.
Integrate robots with mobile devices, smart home ecosystems, enterprise applications, and cloud APIs.
Build telemetry, logging, and evaluation mechanisms that support continuous model improvement.
Contribute to testing, observability, CI/CD, and production deployment practices.