Staff Engineer AI Voice

At Nextiva were reimagining how businesses connect bringing together customer experience and team collaboration on a single conversation centric platform. Powered by AI driven by human innovation.

Our culture is forward thinking customer obsessed and built on the belief that meaningful connections drive better business outcomes. Whether its through our signature Amazing Service the technology we create or the experiences we cultivate connection is at the core of who we are.

If youre ready to collaborate with incredible people make an impact and help businesses everywhere deliver truly amazing experiences this is where you belong.

Location:This is an onsite role based at Nextivas Bengaluruoffice (Wilshire III by MFAR 492HobliRHB Colony Mahadevapura Bengaluru Karnataka 560048). Working together onsite strengthens how weoperate enabling faster decisions clearer communication and stronger execution so you can make a greater impact and move work forward with speed and clarity.

In-Office Expectation: This role is expected to work onsite four days per week withthepotential toincreasetofive days per weekas required by the business. Specific scheduling and flexibility will be guided by your leader to support both team collaboration and individual productivity.

The Staff AI Engineer Voice AI is a hands-on senior individual contributor role for an experienced engineer with deep expertise across AI/ML LLM systems software engineering and distributed system design. This role will help architect build and scale Nextivas next generation of intelligent real-time conversational and Agentic AI experiences.

As a Staff AI Engineer you will operate at the intersection of AI engineering real-time systems system architecture and hands-on software development. You will take ownership of complex AI capabilities from experimentation and early-stage technical solutioning through architecture implementation evaluation production deployment and continuous improvement.

This is not an architecture-only or research-only position. We are looking for someone who remains deeply hands-on writes production-quality code understands modern AI systems in depth and can translate rapidly evolving AI technologies into reliable scalable low-latency production systems.

You will work across the complete Voice AI stack including streaming audio ASR TTS LLM reasoning and orchestration tool/function calling RAG and knowledge systems agentic workflows context and memory management and real-time communications. You will help build AI agents capable of reasoning maintaining context interacting with enterprise systems and executing complex multi-step workflows while delivering natural and reliable conversational experiences.

The role also carries significant technical leadership responsibility. You will drive architecture and design decisions solve ambiguous technical problems mentor engineers influence engineering direction and collaborate across Nextiva teams to advance the Voice AI platform.

We are seeking a Staff AI Engineer with 10 years of engineering experience who combines deep AI/ML expertise with strong software engineering fundamentals and a track record of taking sophisticated AI capabilities from concept to production at scale.

Responsibilities

• Architect build and scale real-time conversational and Agentic AI systems for Nextivas Voice AI platform.

• Own complex AI engineering initiatives end to end from experimentation and early-stage solutioning through architecture implementation evaluation deployment and production optimization.

• Remain deeply hands-on with software development and contribute high-quality production code.

• Design and build low-latency highly available scalable and resilient distributed systems supporting real-time AI workloads.

• Build and optimize Voice AI pipelines spanning streaming audio ASR TTS LLM reasoning tool/function calling agent orchestration and real-time communications.

• Design AI agents capable of maintaining context reasoning over information interacting with enterprise systems and executing complex multi-step workflows.

• Develop and optimize LLM orchestration RAG and knowledge systems embeddings and retrieval prompt/context engineering agent state and memory and workflow orchestration.

• Evaluate and apply techniques including model fine-tuning inference optimization and transformer-based architectures where they improve product quality latency reliability or cost.

• Work with frameworks and technologies such as Pipecat LiveKit LangChain LangGraph n8n and other LLM and agent orchestration technologies where appropriate.

• Design APIs asynchronous processing architectures and event-driven systems that integrate AI capabilities with Nextiva products and enterprise systems.

• Establish and evolve AI observability and evaluation frameworks including tracing offline and online evaluations regression testing conversational quality metrics production monitoring and systematic experimentation.

• Develop guardrails and engineering mechanisms that improve AI quality safety reliability and predictable production behavior.

• Diagnose and optimize end-to-end conversational performance including latency model behavior retrieval quality agent execution and overall conversational experience.

• Drive architecture and technical design decisions for major Voice AI capabilities and help establish engineering patterns and standards for the platform.

• Navigate ambiguous and rapidly evolving technical problems and translate them into practical scalable engineering solutions.

• Mentor engineers provide technical guidance and raise the engineering and AI capabilities of the broader team.

• Collaborate across product engineering AI/ML platform and other Nextiva teams to deliver integrated Voice AI capabilities.

• Stay current with advances in LLMs Agentic AI conversational AI speech technologies and AI engineering and apply emerging approaches where they create meaningful product or engineering value.

Requirements

Basic Qualifications

• 10 years of software engineering experience with significant experience building complex production systems.

• Deep hands-on expertise in AI/ML engineering including experience building and deploying AI-powered applications in production.

• Strong understanding of LLMs and modern generative AI systems including LLM orchestration prompt/context engineering tool/function calling and agentic workflows.

• Experience designing and building Agentic AI systems including agent state memory tool execution workflow orchestration and multi-step reasoning.

• Experience with RAG and knowledge systems including embeddings retrieval strategies vector search context construction and retrieval quality optimization.

• Strong understanding of Machine Learning and Deep Learning fundamentals including transformer architectures and modern model inference.

• Experience with model evaluation fine-tuning and inference optimization.

• Strong software engineering fundamentals and hands-on development experience in Python Java or Go with strong Python experience preferred.

• Strong system design and distributed systems capabilities.

• Experience architecting scalable APIs asynchronous processing systems and event-driven architectures.

• Experience taking AI or software capabilities from experimentation and design through production deployment and operation at scale.

• Strong understanding of production engineering concerns including scalability reliability observability performance and fault tolerance.

• Experience designing systems where low latency and real-time performance are critical.

• Experience with AI evaluation and observability approaches such as tracing offline/online evaluation regression testing production monitoring and quality measurement.

• Ability and willingness to remain deeply hands-on with coding and technical problem solving at Staff Engineer level.

• Demonstrated ability to lead architecture and technical design discussions and influence engineering direction across teams.

• Ability to operate effectively in ambiguous environments where product requirements AI capabilities and technical approaches are evolving.

• Strong communication and collaboration skills across engineering product and technical stakeholders.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building production Voice AI conversational AI or real-time AI systems.

• Hands-on experience with ASR TTS streaming audio speech processing or real-time communication systems.

• Experience with Pipecat LiveKit LangChain LangGraph n8n or comparable AI/agent orchestration technologies.

• Experience designing and operating LLM-powered agents in production.

• Experience optimizing conversational AI systems for latency reliability conversational quality and cost.

• Experience with vector databases embedding models retrieval pipelines and large-scale knowledge systems.

• Experience with Docker and Kubernetes and deploying AI workloads in cloud-native environments.

• Experience with production ML/AI infrastructure model serving inference platforms and AI observability tooling.

• Experience designing guardrails and evaluation systems for production generative AI applications.

• Experience operating as a Staff Engineer or comparable technical leadership role in a similarly sized or larger engineering organization.

• Experience mentoring senior engineers and influencing technical direction beyond an immediate team.

• Experience building new AI products platforms or technical capabilities from the ground up.

AI & Modern Engineering Expectations

• Use modern AI-assisted engineering tools as part of day-to-day development to accelerate coding debugging testing experimentation and engineering workflows.

• Apply strong engineering judgment when working with AI-generated code and recommendations including appropriate validation testing security review and technical assessment.

• Maintain a strong understanding of evolving LLM Agentic AI Voice AI and generative AI technologies and evaluate them based on measurable product and engineering outcomes.

• Understand the tradeoffs between models orchestration approaches retrieval techniques agent architectures and infrastructure choices across quality latency reliability scalability and cost.

• Build systematic evaluation into AI development rather than relying solely on subjective testing using offline and online evals regression suites tracing experimentation and production metrics.

• Design AI systems with appropriate guardrails observability failure handling and production controls.

• Contribute directly to experimentation and production implementation rather than operating solely as an architectural or advisory resource.

Additional Qualities

• Strong sense of ownership and accountability for systems from design through production operation.

• Comfortable working through ambiguity and solving technically complex early-stage problems.

• Able to move fluidly between AI experimentation system architecture and hands-on implementation.

• Strong technical judgment and ability to make pragmatic decisions in rapidly evolving areas of AI.

• Passion for building high-quality real-time conversational experiences.

• Strong focus on measurable improvements in AI quality latency reliability scalability and conversational performance.

• Able to balance experimentation and innovation with the engineering rigor required for production systems.

• Collaborative approach to working across engineering AI/ML product and platform teams.

• Comfortable mentoring engineers and influencing technical decisions without relying on formal management authority.

• Self-directed and effective operating as a senior individual contributor with broad technical ownership.

Nextiva DNA (Core Competencies)

Drives Results

Action-oriented with a passion for solving problems. Brings clarity to ambiguity challenges the status quo and drives meaningful outcomes.

Critical Thinker

Understands the why uses data to inform decisions anticipates challenges and provides thoughtful solutions.

Right Attitude

Team-oriented resilient and collaborative. Willing to step in support others and contribute to a strong service-driven culture.

About Nextiva

Nextiva helps businesses create exceptional customer experiences and build deeper more meaningful relationships for growth. Our unified trusted and modern platform leverages AI and automation to drive exceptional outcomes for customers and improve business performance.

At Nextiva we are committed to building a unified trusted and modern platform that empowers businesses to deliver exceptional customer experiences and we invest in people who help make that possible.

Total Rewards

Our Total Rewards offerings are designed to allow our employees to take care of themselves and their families so they can be their best in and out of the office.

Our compensation packages are tailored to each role and candidates qualifications. We consider a wide range of factors including skills experience training and certifications when determining compensation. We aim to offer competitive salaries or wages that reflect the value you bring to our team. Depending on the position compensation may include base salary and/or hourly wages incentives or bonuses.

• Medical - Medical insurance coverage is available for employees their spouse and up to two dependent children with a limit of 500000 INR as well as their parents or in-laws for up to 300000 INR. This comprehensive coverage ensures that essential healthcare needs are met for the entire family unit providing peace of mind and security in times of medical necessity.
• Group Term & Group Personal Accident Insurance - Provides insurance coverage against the risk of death / injury during the policy period sustained due to an accident caused by violent visible & external means.
  • Coverage Type - Employee Only
  • Sum Insured - 3 times of annual CTC with minimum cap of INR
  • Free Cover Limit - 1.5 Crore
• Work-Life Balance - 15 days of Privilege leaves per calendar year 6 days of Paid Sick leave per calendar year 6 days of Casual leave per calendar year. Paid 26 weeks of Maternity leaves 1 week of Paternity leave a day off on your Birthday and paid holidays
• Financial Security - Provident Fund & Gratuity
• Wellness - Employee Assistance Program and comprehensive wellness initiatives
• Growth - Access to ongoing learning and development opportunities and career advancement

At Nextiva were committed to supporting our employees health well-being and professional growth. Join us and build a rewarding career!

Beware of Recruitment Fraud: At Nextiva we follow a merit-based hiring process and do not charge any fees or require a deposit at any stage. We also do not authorize any third parties to collect payments or sensitive information on our behalf.

All genuine communications from Nextiva originate from official email addresses ending in @. Communications received from free email services (such as Gmail Yahoo or Hotmail) purporting to be from Nextiva should be treated as fraudulent. If you are contacted by a third-party claiming to represent us please verify their credentials by writing to .

We encourage candidates to stay vigilant and verify the authenticity of any communication claiming to be from Nextiva including unsolicited calls WhatsApp messages and Telegram communications. While we strive to maintain a secure hiring process Nextiva is not responsible for any losses arising from fraudulent activities. If you believe that you have been a victim of recruitment fraud please contact your law enforcement agencies immediately.

For genuine opportunities please apply only through our official career sites: Nextiva Careers&Nextiva Jobs on LinkedIn.

#LI-PJ1 #LI-Onsite

Founded in 2008 Nextiva has grown into a global leader trusted by over 100000 businesses and 1M users worldwide. Headquartered in Scottsdale Arizona and with teams across the globe were the future of customer experience and team collaboration through our AI-powered conversation-centric platform.

Want to see what life at Nextiva is all about Connect with us on InstagramInstagram MXYouTubeLinkedIn and theNextiva Blog.