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Jobs · Information Technology · Wisconsin

Senior Backend Software Engineer, Solve Voice

Zendesk · Madison, WI · 3 wk ago
Information Technology$145k–$217k/yrFull-time

About the role

Join us at Zendesk, where we're on a mission to power exceptional service for every person on the planet. We're accelerating that ambition by building products rooted in AI, automation, and intelligent customer experiences. We’re seeking a Senior Full Stack Engineer to build the real-time voice AI product that makes live conversations feel natural and reliable. Your work will reduce latency, improve conversation flow, and make voice interactions an effective channel for AI-driven support.

Responsibilities

  • Design and implement backend services powering real-time voice conversations, focusing on latency, reliability, and observability.
  • Build integrations for telephony, WebRTC, real-time audio processing, and external AI/speech services.
  • Ship end-to-end product features across backend systems and user-facing web experiences when required.
  • Improve platform reliability and performance: monitoring, tracing, autoscaling, and failure recovery.
  • Address real-time interaction challenges such as turn-taking, interruptions, responsiveness, and graceful handoff to humans.
  • Partner with product and design to deliver voice experiences that feel polished and human.

Requirements

  • Solid backend fundamentals with experience designing APIs, async systems, and scalable integrations.
  • Hands-on experience with real-time systems (WebRTC, WebSockets) or telephony protocols.
  • Product-driven engineering mindset — you ship user-facing features and care about UX quality.
  • Ability to debug and optimize latency and reliability issues in production systems.
  • Enjoys cross-functional collaboration with product, design, and ML/speech teams.

Qualifications

Basic Qualifications

  • 3+ years building production software, with significant backend engineering experience.
  • Experience with real-time or event-driven systems (WebRTC, SIP, streaming APIs).
  • Proficiency in Python or equivalent backend languages and async architectures.

Preferred Qualifications

  • Experience with telephony stacks, SIP, media servers, or speech/ASR/TTS integrations.
  • Familiarity with LLMs, speech models, or conversational AI production infrastructure.
  • Experience on fullstack teams shipping both backend and frontend user experiences.
  • Expertise in diagnosing performance and reliability issues under real-time constraints.

Pay

The US annualized base salary range for this position is $145,000.00 - $217,000.00. This position may also be eligible for bonus, benefits, or related incentives. The offer for the successful candidate will be based on job-related capabilities, applicable experience, and work location.

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