Software Engineer - Voice AI (Inference Runtime)

The Role

Voice is becoming the internet’s next interface, but a production-grade Voice AI system is "hard to build" You’ll join a small founding team of Baseten Voice AI, focused on bringing state-of-the-art open source models into production for Voice AI customers across productivity, customer service, clinical conversation, creator tools, education, and more. You’ll make a meaningful impact on people’s daily lives and help reshape these industries.

This is a high-impact, high-ownership role. You will be the primary owner of Baseten Voice AI - our in-house inference stack to power Voice AI models - from product roadmap through engineering implementation. You’ll partner closely with Forward Deployed Engineers, Model Performance Engineers, and sister engineering teams to push the boundaries of Voice AI.

Example Initiatives

• Develop world-class model serving stack for state-of-the-art open-source voice models - reduce end-to-end and tail latency (p95/p99), increase throughput, and improve GPU efficiency via profiling, runtime tuning, and server-level optimizations.
• Build large-scale, real-time infrastructure for multi-model voice agents - orchestrate STT, TTS, and agent components with streaming I/O to meet customer SLOs.
• Design tight training and inference iteration loops for voice model customization - enable fast evaluation, safe rollout, and rapid experimentation for custom voice model development.
• Past projects:
• Baseten leads Coval’s voice AI benchmark
• How Notion achieved 2-3x lower latency with AI Meeting Notes
• Cost-efficient, high-performance TTS with Qwen3-TTS
• Fine-tuning Qwen3-TTS for high-quality voice cloning
• The fastest Whisper - with streaming and diarization

Responsibilities

• Own and lead Voice AI product areas end-to-end - from architecture and system design through implementation, rollout, and long-term production operations.
• Design, build, and operate real-time, large-scale, high-performance model serving systems for STT, TTS, and voice agent workloads for mission-critical customer deployments
• Drive cross-team collaboration with sister engineering teams to solve full-stack technical problems, align on priorities, and coordinate end-to-end delivery across the product surface area
• Mentor teammates through code reviews, design docs, and technical leadership.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science or related field
• Proven track record owning production-grade real-time, large-scale systems where tail latency (p99) matters.
• Proficient coding abilities in one or more popular programming or scripting languages; Python proficiency is a plus.
• Good taste in product, particularly developer-oriented tools
• Interest in ML/AI infrastructure and willingness to learn
• Strong collaboration and communication skills
• Comfortable using AI coding assistants (e.g., Claude Code, Codex, Cursor) as a daily productivity multiplier - as an AI-native company, we see this as a must-have skill.

Nice to Have

• Experience implementing pipeline-level model runtime optimizations such as dynamic batching, async scheduling, or decode-side throughput improvements.
• Experience building developer platforms: SDKs, CLIs, APIs, and self-serve workflows for ML or infrastructure products.
• Experience with containerization and orchestration technologies (Docker, Kubernetes), service meshes, or distributed scheduling.
• Familiarity with speech/audio ML models (STT, TTS, speech-to-speech)
• Familiarity with model-serving runtimes (vLLM, TensorRT, ONNX).
• Familiarity with systems-level performance profiling across host-device boundaries (e.g. PyTorch Profiler), diagnosing GPU utilization issues
• Exposure to customer-facing engineering: pre-sales prototyping, technical discovery, or working directly with customers to ship solutions.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation, including meaningful equity
• (U.S. only) 100% coverage of medical, dental, and vision insurance for employee and dependents
• Flexible PTO policy including company wide Winter Break (our offices are closed from Christmas Eve to New Year's Day!)
• Paid parental leave
• Fertility and family-building stipend through Carrot
• (U.S. only) Company-facilitated 401(k)
• Exposure to a variety of ML startups, offering unparalleled learning and networking opportunities.

Apply now to embark on a rewarding journey in shaping the future of AI! If you are a motivated individual with a passion for machine learning and a desire to be part of a collaborative and forward-thinking team, we would love to hear from you.