Sr. Software Engineer - Robot Applications & Voice AI

About the role

AI That Moves the World. Careers That Move You Forward.

At 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.

As 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.

About the role

Location: California Bay area

Humanoid 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.

Role Overview

The 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.

Your Impact

• Build software powering the next generation of intelligent humanoid robots.
• Work on Voice AI, Agentic AI, LLMs, VLMs, and Physical AI products.
• Collaborate with experts in robotics, conversational AI, embedded systems, and cloud computing.
• See your work deployed in real-world robotic environments.

Key Responsibilities

• Application Layer & Business Logic: Implement high-level application software, interaction workflows, and robotic behavioral state machines.
• Intent-to-Action Orchestration: Build the core logic that translates human speech, gestures, environmental cues, and contextual information into deterministic robotic tasks.
• Multi-Modal Interaction Fusion: Integrate vision pipelines, object detection, scene understanding, spatial tracking, and voice interactions to provide contextual awareness.
• Voice Application Engineering: Develop robust voice applications managing STT, NLU, dialog management, wake-word detection, and TTS interfaces.
• Agentic AI Development: Build orchestration workflows combining LLMs, VLMs, memory systems, tool calling, reasoning engines, and robotic capabilities.
• Robot Capability Integration: Consume and orchestrate navigation, manipulation, perception, and device-control services exposed by the robotics platform.
• Edge/Cloud Partitioning: Optimize applications to balance low-latency local execution with cloud-based AI services.
• Multi-Device & Ecosystem Integrations: Integrate robots with mobile devices, smart home ecosystems, enterprise applications, and cloud APIs.
• Data Loop Contribution: Build telemetry, logging, and evaluation mechanisms supporting continuous model improvement.
• Deployment & Production Readiness: Contribute to testing, observability, CI/CD, and production deployment practices.

Required Skills & Experience

Mandatory (Must Have)

• Orchestration & Logic Frameworks: Strong proficiency in BehaviorTree.CPP, state machines, workflow orchestration engines, or task-planning architectures.
• Cognitive AI & Agent Systems: Hands-on experience building applications using LLMs, VLMs, tool-calling architectures, agent frameworks, RAG systems, or semantic memory platforms.
• Programming: 5+ years of professional software engineering experience using Python and/or C++.
• Application Architecture: Experience designing scalable application-layer software, API-driven systems, distributed services, and event-driven architectures.
• Edge Compute Management: Experience optimizing software on resource-constrained edge hardware under intermittent connectivity conditions.
• Cloud & AI Services: Experience integrating cloud AI services, model serving platforms, and containerized deployments.
• Software Quality & Production Delivery: Automated testing, debugging, monitoring, observability, and CI/CD practices.
• Human-Robot Interaction Mindset: Experience designing natural, context-aware human-machine experiences.

Good to Have (Highly Valued Plus)

• Voice & Speech Stack: Cerence, Whisper, Deepgram, Azure Speech, ElevenLabs, AWS Speech Services, STT/TTS/NLU platforms.
• Robotics Framework Consumption: ROS2 application nodes, Services, Actions, Topics, navigation and manipulation APIs.
• Vision & Multi-Modal AI: Object detection, scene understanding, visual grounding, and spatial reasoning systems.
• Audio Hardware Integration: Beamforming, Acoustic Echo Cancellation (AEC), microphone arrays, and noise suppression.
• Physical AI Applications: Experience building software for humanoids, service robots, warehouse automation, or embodied AI systems.
• Data & Learning Pipelines: Telemetry, analytics, evaluation systems, retraining pipelines, and AI feedback loops.
• Containerization & Deployment: Docker, Kubernetes, OTA updates, and edge deployment environments.
• Startup Environment: Comfortable owning solutions from concept through deployment in a fast-moving environment.

What we offer

• We offer a generous compensation and benefits package (in addition to the base salary), including:
• Salary 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.
• Annual bonus opportunity
• Insurance coverage (medical, dental, vision, life, and disability)
• Paid time off
• Paid holidays
• Company contribution to the 401(k) plan
• Equity awards for certain positions and levels
• Remote 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.

Education & Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Robotics, Software Engineering, AI, or a related discipline.

Additional information

Cerence 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.