Staff Software Engineer, Voice San Francisco or Remote (US) $245,000 – $310,000

About this role

Staff Software Engineer, Voice

San Francisco or Remote (US)Full-time$245,000 – $310,000

About the role

Pazau Voice answers millions of calls a year for insurers, credit unions and travel brands, and handles first notice of loss, card disputes and rebookings. On a phone call, a 900 ms pause feels broken, and an AI agent that mishears a policy number can file the wrong claim. You'll be the technical lead for the real-time voice pipeline: telephony ingress, streaming speech recognition, turn-taking, model orchestration, speech synthesis and warm handoff to human agents.

The base salary range for this role is $245,000 – $310,000. Final offers depend on level and location, and every offer includes equity.

What you'll do

• Own the architecture of the streaming voice stack, from SIP and WebRTC ingress through ASR, the Pazau Agent runtime and TTS, with a p95 turn latency target under 700 ms
• Design barge-in, endpointing and turn-taking so that callers can interrupt naturally without the agent losing its place in a Procedure
• Build the PCI DSS-scoped payment capture path so that card numbers spoken on a call never reach a model or a transcript
• Lead warm handoff: move a live call, its transcript and the agent's reasoning trace to a human in Pazau Inbox without the caller repeating themselves
• Set the technical bar for a team of eight engineers through design reviews, on-call and mentoring
• Work with Tandem Credit Union, Meridian Mutual and other design partners on their hardest call flows

What you'll bring

• 10+ years building production systems, including at least 3 years on real-time audio, telephony or low-latency streaming
• Deep experience with at least one of SIP, WebRTC, RTP or media servers such as FreeSWITCH or Asterisk
• A track record of leading multi-quarter technical projects across teams
• Fluency in Go, Rust or TypeScript. Our voice services are mostly Go, with Rust in the audio path
• Comfort owning a system that customers' customers call when something has gone wrong

Nice to have

• Experience with streaming ASR/TTS vendors or self-hosted speech models
• Built or operated a PCI DSS-scoped system
• Worked on contact-center platforms such as Genesys, Amazon Connect or Twilio Flex

Benefits

• Medical, dental and vision for you and your dependents, with 100% of premiums covered
• Equity in Pazau, with a 10-year exercise window after you leave
• 16 weeks of fully paid parental leave for every parent
• 401(k) with a 4% match
• $2,000 a year for learning, plus conference travel when you're speaking
• Four weeks of paid time off, plus a company-wide week off at the end of December

See the full benefits overview on our careers page.

Our interview process

1. Recruiter call (30 min). We walk through the role, compensation and timeline, and answer your questions first.
2. Hiring manager conversation (45 min). A conversation about work you're proud of and the problems this team owns.
3. System design interview (90 min). You'll design a voice pipeline with us live. We care about how you reason through latency budgets and failure modes, not about memorized answers.
4. Final interviews (3–4 hours, virtual or on-site). Three or four conversations with the people you'd work with every day, including one cross-functional partner.
5. Founder conversation and references. A 30-minute conversation with Amara or Lukas, then two references you choose.

Most candidates go from first call to offer in three to four weeks. You'll hear back from us within three business days after every stage, and every candidate who reaches final interviews gets written feedback.