Senior Staff Software Engineer

ServiceNow•Santa Clara, CA

3h•$190,900 - $334,100•Hybrid

About The Position

The Staff Software Engineer, Voice Connectivity Engineering designs, builds, ships, and operates the connectivity layer between a customer's existing telephony and CCaaS environment and the ServiceNow Voice ecosystem. The engineer works across the full lifecycle: mapping a customer's SIP trunks, CTI integrations, and CCaaS-specific APIs, building and hardening the signaling, media, and event integrations that connect those systems to ServiceNow's Voice/CTI and Native Voice Controls platform, and proving through testing and production monitoring that calls connect, stay connected, and hand off cleanly under real network and carrier conditions. This is not an agent-building role — the engineer is not primarily authoring the prompts or instructions that drive voice AI agent behavior — but it is the foundation those agents run on: without a reliable connectivity layer, no agent, however well designed, can reach a live caller. Two things follow. First, correctness here is measured in call setup success, audio quality, latency, and failover behavior rather than model output — the engineer's product is a connection that has to hold up under real carrier, network, and vendor conditions, not just in a reference environment. Second, because every customer's telephony and CCaaS setup differs — different SIP providers, media gateways, authentication schemes, and CCaaS vendor quirks — the engineer must design integrations that are resilient and diagnosable, with clear failure signals when a segment of the call path breaks, rather than integrations that only work against the reference stack.

Requirements

A demonstrated track record of building, shipping, and operating production telephony or CCaaS integrations at a Staff Software Engineer level, including hands-on delivery of connectivity between third-party telephony/CCaaS platforms and a hosted or cloud service.
Direct, hands-on experience integrating with CCaaS platforms using common patterns — SIP trunking and signaling, WebSocket and streaming media APIs, and real-time audio interfaces — across multiple CCaaS providers, is required.
Demonstrated technical leadership is expected at this level: setting architectural direction across teams, mentoring engineers, and driving cross-team integration decisions on voice and telephony systems.
Willingness to work directly with customers in a forward deployed capacity, embedded in their telephony and contact center environment, is required; prior forward deployed experience is an advantage.
Typically 8+ years of production software experience, with several years focused on telephony, CTI, or real-time communications systems.
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
Software engineering fundamentals. Strong command of data structures, algorithms, system design, APIs, data modeling, and testing.
CCaaS and telephony integration patterns. Hands-on experience integrating with CCaaS platforms and telephony infrastructure using SIP trunking and signaling, WebSocket and streaming media APIs, and real-time audio interfaces, across multiple providers such as Genesys, NICE, Five9, Amazon Connect, and Twilio, as well as traditional CTI/PBX systems.
Real-time communications and media handling. Practical knowledge of SIP, RTP/SRTP, WebRTC, codecs, media gateways, and the latency, jitter, and packet-loss characteristics of live audio.
Call path reliability and observability. Ability to design for failover and graceful degradation across carriers and vendors, and to instrument, monitor, and diagnose connectivity issues in production.
Voice platform architecture. Working knowledge of how a hosted voice and agent ecosystem — such as ServiceNow's Voice/CTI and Native Voice Controls — consumes audio, signaling, and event streams, enough to design an integration the platform can reliably use without building the agent logic itself.
Specification precision and architectural judgment. Ability to define integration and connectivity problems rigorously enough for another engineer to implement correctly, and sound judgment on build-versus-integrate tradeoffs across vendor ecosystems.
Safety, security, and data handling. Working knowledge of risks specific to telephony integrations — SIP security, media encryption, call-recording and PII handling, over-broad access — translated into concrete guardrails and monitoring.
Forward deployed delivery and stakeholder communication. Comfort working directly with customers inside their telephony environment under incomplete information and fixed timelines, and credibility communicating capability, limitation, and risk to non-engineers.
At least 8 years of experience in software engineering with at least 2 years of experience in deploying contemporary AI solutions at customers.

Nice To Haves

Prior forward deployed experience is an advantage.
Advanced degrees or certifications are a plus but are not a substitute for a demonstrated record of shipping reliable, production voice and telephony connectivity.
Forward deployed or customer-embedded delivery. Prior work as a forward deployed engineer, solution engineer, or in professional services, delivering software inside a customer's environment.
Carrier and infrastructure depth. Experience with SIP trunk provisioning, PSTN/carrier relationships, number porting, and codec-level audio handling below the application layer.
CCaaS platform specialization. Deep, hands-on experience with one or more major CCaaS platforms — such as Genesys, NICE, Five9, or Amazon Connect — beyond generic integration patterns.
Observability tooling. Experience with tracing, monitoring, and analysis tooling for real-time communications systems, and analysis of production call and connectivity data at scale.
Enterprise domain depth. Customer service, contact center operations, or enterprise IT/telephony operations, at a depth sufficient to challenge a requirement rather than only implement it.

Responsibilities

Build the connectivity layer. Design, build, and operate the SIP trunking, signaling, and media integrations that connect a customer's telephony and CCaaS platform to ServiceNow's Voice/CTI and Native Voice Controls ecosystem.
Integrate with CCaaS and telephony platforms. Implement and harden integrations using the common patterns of SIP trunking and signaling, WebSocket and streaming media APIs, and real-time audio and event interfaces — across CCaaS providers such as Genesys, NICE, Five9, Amazon Connect, and Twilio, as well as traditional CTI/PBX and carrier setups.
Own call path reliability. Design for call setup success, failover, and graceful degradation across carriers, media gateways, and network conditions; instrument and monitor the connectivity layer for latency, jitter, packet loss, and dropped-call causes.
Deliver as a forward deployed engineer, embedded in the customer's environment. Work directly inside a customer's telephony, CTI, and CCaaS environment — mapping their existing architecture, standing up and tuning the connection into ServiceNow's Voice ecosystem, and troubleshooting live issues on their network and vendor stack.
Feed the Voice AI agent layer cleanly. Ensure the audio, signaling, and event streams the connectivity layer delivers are clean, well-formed, and low-latency enough for the voice AI agents running on ServiceNow's Voice ecosystem to operate correctly — partnering with agent engineering rather than building the agents yourself.
Design for security and compliance on the call path. Implement SIP security, media encryption, authentication, and least-privilege access across the connectivity layer, and account for what regulated or high-security customer environments require.
Specify precisely and direct engineering work. Convert customer telephony and CCaaS requirements into testable specifications and integration runbooks with explicit scope, constraints, and acceptance criteria; decompose work into implementable tasks and review the result for correctness and maintainability.
Own quality and reliability in production. Monitor connectivity health across live customer deployments, triage call-path incidents, and feed recurring failure patterns back into architecture and runbooks.
Collaborate across product, design, and engineering. Partner with product managers, voice AI agent engineers, and platform teams — Voice/CTI, CCaaS, and Native Voice Controls — to define integration requirements, align on tradeoffs, and communicate capability and risk clearly.