{"id":462297,"url":"https://alion.io/job/cerence-principal-software-engineer-robot-applications-voice-ai","title":"Sr. Software Engineer – Robot Applications & Voice AI","company":{"id":178070,"name":"Cerence","domain":"cerence.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/cerence","size_band":"1001-5000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Workday","truth_index":{"grade":"C","score":62,"open_postings":27,"ghost_share":0.63,"stale_share":0,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":35,"computed_at":"2026-11-09T06:03:00Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"senior","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"remote","remote_scope":"stated_countries","remote_scope_basis":"board_field","remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":["US"],"hiring_countries_total":1,"salary":{"min":107000,"max":172000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":172000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":5,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":true,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"BehaviorTree.CPP","optional":false},{"name":"C++","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"Function Calling","optional":false},{"name":"Multimodal AI","optional":false},{"name":"Physical AI","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"RAG","optional":false},{"name":"Text-to-Speech","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":true},{"name":"Azure","optional":true},{"name":"Deepgram","optional":true},{"name":"Docker","optional":true},{"name":"ElevenLabs","optional":true},{"name":"Embodied AI","optional":true},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":true},{"name":"ROS2","optional":true},{"name":"Whisper","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-07-28T00:00:00Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-11-06","last_verified_at":"2026-11-09T03:59:58Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":104,"trust":{"level":"ghost","repost_count":1,"flags":["stale","company_stale"],"days_open":104},"description":"AI That Moves the World. Careers That Move You Forward.\nAt Cerence AI, you’ll help transform advanced AI into trusted, real-world solutions that make complex technology - think vehicles, robots, smart manufacturing, and emerging intelligent devices - more natural, reliable, and useful. Building on decades of innovation and global deployment in automotive, we are extending our expertise into new products, markets, and intelligent systems.\nAs part of our global team, you’ll work alongside leading innovators, researchers, engineers, and business leaders to solve meaningful challenges and turn breakthrough ideas into technology people use every day. You’ll have the opportunity to make a visible impact, help shape Cerence AI’s next chapter, and move your own career forward.\n--------------------------------------------------------------\nSr. Software Engineer - Robot Applications & Voice AI\nLocation : California Bay area\nHumanoid robots become truly useful when they understand human intent and convert it into meaningful action. At Cerence, we are building the cognitive and application layer that combines Voice AI, Agentic AI, multimodal reasoning, and robotic capabilities into intuitive human-robot experiences.\nRole Overview\nThe Sr. Software Engineer drives the application and cognitive layer of our humanoid robot. Working directly with the core robotics platform designed by our Architect, you will turn human intent into high-level physical actions. This role focuses on building advanced voice applications, multi-modal context systems, and programming the core business logic and behavior trees that make the robot interactive, helpful, and intuitive.\nYour Impact\nBuild software powering the next generation of intelligent humanoid robots. \nWork on Voice AI, Agentic AI, LLMs, VLMs, and Physical AI products. \nCollaborate with experts in robotics, conversational AI, embedded systems, and cloud computing. \nSee your work deployed in real-world robotic environments. \nKey Responsibilities\nApplication Layer & Business Logic: Implement high-level application software, interaction workflows, and robotic behavioral state machines.\nIntent-to-Action Orchestration: Build the core logic that translates human speech, gestures, environmental cues, and contextual information into deterministic robotic tasks.\nMulti-Modal Interaction Fusion: Integrate vision pipelines, object detection, scene understanding, spatial tracking, and voice interactions to provide contextual awareness.\nVoice Application Engineering: Develop robust voice applications managing STT, NLU, dialog management, wake-word detection, and TTS interfaces.\nAgentic AI Development: Build orchestration workflows combining LLMs, VLMs, memory systems, tool calling, reasoning engines, and robotic capabilities.\nRobot Capability Integration: Consume and orchestrate navigation, manipulation, perception, and device-control services exposed by the robotics platform.\nEdge/Cloud Partitioning: Optimize applications to balance low-latency local execution with cloud-based AI services.\nMulti-Device & Ecosystem Integrations: Integrate robots with mobile devices, smart home ecosystems, enterprise applications, and cloud APIs.\nData Loop Contribution: Build telemetry, logging, and evaluation mechanisms supporting continuous model improvement.\nDeployment & Production Readiness: Contribute to testing, observability, CI/CD, and production deployment practices.\nRequired Skills & Experience\nMandatory (Must Have)\nOrchestration & Logic Frameworks: Strong proficiency in BehaviorTree.CPP, state machines, workflow orchestration engines, or task-planning architectures. \nCognitive AI & Agent Systems: Hands-on experience building applications using LLMs, VLMs, tool-calling architectures, agent frameworks, RAG systems, or semantic memory platforms. \nProgramming: 5+ years of professional software engineering experience using Python and/or C++. \nApplication Architecture: Experience designing scalable application-layer software, API-driven systems, distributed services, and event-driven architectures. \nEdge Compute Management: Experience optimizing software on resource-constrained edge hardware under intermittent connectivity conditions. \nCloud & AI Services: Experience integrating cloud AI services, model serving platforms, and containerized deployments. \nSoftware Quality & Production Delivery: Automated testing, debugging, monitoring, observability, and CI/CD practices. \nHuman-Robot Interaction Mindset: Experience designing natural, context-aware human-machine experiences. \nGood to Have (Highly Valued Plus)\nVoice & Speech Stack: Cerence, Whisper, Deepgram, Azure Speech, ElevenLabs, AWS Speech Services, STT/TTS/NLU platforms. \nRobotics Framework Consumption: ROS2 application nodes, Services, Actions, Topics, navigation and manipulation APIs. \nVision & Multi-Modal AI: Object detection, scene understanding, visual grounding, and spatial reasoning systems. \nAudio Hardware Integration: Beamforming, Acoustic Echo Cancellation (AEC), microphone arrays, and noise suppression. \nPhysical AI Applications: Experience building software for humanoids, service robots, warehouse automation, or embodied AI systems. \nData & Learning Pipelines: Telemetry, analytics, evaluation systems, retraining pipelines, and AI feedback loops. \nContainerization & Deployment: Docker, Kubernetes, OTA updates, and edge deployment environments. \nStartup Environment: Comfortable owning solutions from concept through deployment in a fast-moving environment. \nWhy Join the Team\nBuild software powering the next generation of intelligent humanoid robots. \nWork across Voice AI, Agentic AI, Physical AI, and Conversational Systems. \nCollaborate with experts in speech, AI, robotics, cloud, and embedded systems. \nHelp shape the future of human-machine interaction. \nWhat we offer\nWe offer a generous compensation and benefits package (in addition to the base salary), including: \nSalary range $107,000 - $172,000 USD. It is not typical for offers to be made at or near the top of the range. The actual salary will be determined based on experience and other job-related factors. \nAnnual bonus opportunity \nInsurance coverage (medical, dental, vision, life, and disability) \nPaid time off \nPaid holidays \nCompany contribution to the 401(k) plan \nEquity awards for certain positions and levels \nRemote and/or hybrid work available depending on the position All compensation and benefits are subject to the terms and conditions of the underlying plans or programs, as applicable, and may be amended, terminated, or replaced from time to time. \nEducation & Qualifications\nBachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Robotics, Software Engineering, AI, or a related discipline. \nCerence AI (NASDAQ: CRNC) helps people and intelligent systems work together naturally and reliably. Proven at global scale in automotive, Cerence provides the trusted interaction and action layer connecting people, machines, and intelligent systems. Its AI platform enables natural interaction and dependable action across complex real-world environments where reliability, safety, security, and performance are critical. Working with customers and partners worldwide, Cerence transforms advanced AI into trusted solutions that bridge the gap between AI potential and real-world performance.\nFor more information, visit www.cerence.ai.\nEQUAL OPPORTUNITY EMPLOYER\nCerence is firmly committed to Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) and to compliance with all federal, state and local laws that prohibit employment discrimination on the basis of age, race, color, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sex, sex stereotyping, pregnancy, national origin, ancestry, religion, physical or mental disability, medical condition, marital status, citizenship status, sexual orientation, protected military or veteran status, genetic information and other protected classifications. Cerence Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.\nAll prospective and current Employees need to remain vigilant when it comes to executing security policies in the workplace. This includes:\n- Following workplace security protocols and training programs to familiarize with the ways to maintain a safe workplace.\n- Following security procedures to report any suspicious activity.\n- Having respect for corporate security procedures to allow those procedures to be effective.\n- Adhering to company's compliance and regulations.\n- Encouraging to follow a zero tolerance for workplace violence.\n- Basic knowledge of information security and data privacy requirements (e.g., how to protect data & how to be handling this data).\n- Demonstrative knowledge of information security through internal training programs.","description_format":"text","description_chars":8732,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":5,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity","Hybrid work","Insurance coverage"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Artificial Intelligence","Conversational AI","Speech & Audio AI","Automotive Software"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-06T11:26:14Z"},{"event":"close","at":"2026-10-11T07:55:40Z"},{"event":"reopen","at":"2026-11-06T20:52:24Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":8,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.3,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":104,"expected_fill_days":35,"reasons":["conf:2","stale_co","ghost","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-11-09T06:03:00Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":172000,"is_top_pay":false},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/cerence-principal-software-engineer-robot-applications-voice-ai","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/cerence-principal-software-engineer-robot-applications-voice-ai.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-09T13:49:33Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":18450,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-10T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.1,"usd":0.01,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":178070},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=178070"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fcerence-principal-software-engineer-robot-applications-voice-ai"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":2,"usd":0.2},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fcerence-principal-software-engineer-robot-applications-voice-ai"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.1,"usd":0.01},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fcerence-principal-software-engineer-robot-applications-voice-ai"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/cerence-principal-software-engineer-robot-applications-voice-ai\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fcerence-principal-software-engineer-robot-applications-voice-ai"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":462297}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"cerence.com","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":462297},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. 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