Staff Software Engineer, Voice Agent

About Decagon Decagon is the leading conversational AI platform empowering every brand to deliver concierge customer experiences. Our technology enables industry-defining enterprises like Avis Budget Group, Block’s Cash App and Square, Chime, Oura Health, and Hunter Douglas to deploy AI agents that power personalized, deeply satisfying interactions across voice, chat, email, SMS, and every other channel. We’re building a future where customer experiences are being redefined from support tickets and hold music to faster resolutions, richer conversations, and deeper relationships. We’re proud to be backed by world-class investors who share that vision, including a16z, Accel, Bain Capital Ventures, Coatue, and Index Ventures, along with many others. We’re an in-office company, driven by a shared commitment to excellence and velocity. Our values — Just Get It Done, Invent What Customers Want, Winner’s Mindset, and The Polymath Principle — shape how we work and grow as a team. About the Team The Voice Agent team builds the real-time systems that allow Decagon agents to carry natural conversations across our omnichannels (phone, web, mobile, etc). We work across speech understanding, audio streaming, synthesis quality, and the voice specific execution logic that enables timing, pacing, and responsive dialogue. Our systems must remain accurate, responsive, and stable at scale. Voice is one of the most technically challenging surfaces in conversational AI, and our small team owns this entire capability end-to-end. About the Role As a Staff Software Engineer focused on Voice Agent, you will lead the architecture and evolution of Decagon’s voice platform. You will drive multi-quarter projects that improve timing, responsiveness, audio quality, and reliability across millions of interactions. You will collaborate with Research to integrate the next generation of speech models, with Infra to push the boundaries of latency and performance, and with Product to bring new voice capabilities to customers. You will help set engineering standards for voice, mentor senior engineers, and raise the technical bar for one of Decagon’s most important surfaces. In this role, you will - Own the architecture of Decagon’s real-time voice runtime and shape its long-term roadmap - Lead initiatives that improve speech understanding, synthesis quality, and conversational timing - Define reliability, testing, and observability standards for live voice interactions - Build frameworks that make voice systems easy to debug, measure, and iterate on - Mentor senior engineers and help expand the technical culture of the Voice group Your background looks something like this - 8+ years of engineering experience with significant technical leadership - Expertise in real-time systems, streaming pipelines, or audio-based applications - Ability to define architectural direction and lead cross-functional projects - Strong debugging skills across audio, networking, and model-driven systems - Experience mentoring engineers and influencing engineering standards Even better if you have - Experience with speech recognition or synthesis systems - Experience with VAD, streaming protocols, or other real-time audio systems - Experience designing or maintaining LLM-driven applications - Experience optimizing performance for low-latency use cases Compensation $200K – $400K + Offers Equity This range reflects the expected compensation for this role. Compensation within the range is determined based on experience, skills, and the scope of responsibilities, with flexibility for candidates who demonstrate exceptional impact. In addition to base salary, we offer competitive equity. Final compensation may vary based on location within the United States. Benefits We proudly offer the following benefits for our full-time employees: - Take what you need vacation policy (subject to local requirements; UK employees receive 25 days of statutory leave) - Medical, Dental, and Vision benefits for yo