Staff Engineer AI - Voice

Location: This is an onsite role based at Nextiva’s Bengaluru office (Wilshire III by MFAR, 492, Hobli, RHB Colony, Mahadevapura, Bengaluru, Karnataka 560048). Working together onsite strengthens how we operate, 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, with the potential to increase to five days per week, as 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 Nextiva’s 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 Nextiva’s 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 candidate's 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 500,000 INR, as well as their parents or in-laws for up to 300,000 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 10,00,000
  • 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, we're 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 “@nextiva.com”.  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 talent@nextiva.com. 

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