Senior AI Engineer

About Birdeye
Birdeye builds AI coworkers for multi-location brands. Jay for marketing, Myna for operations, and Robin for customer experience orchestrate AI agents to win AI visibility, book appointments, and drive consistent CX at every location. They run on BirdAI, the Agent OS built on 13 years of multi-location data infrastructure and 3,000+ integrations. BirdAI consolidates every signal, reasons with industry, brand and location context, and acts autonomously or with a human in the loop.
Birdeye is trusted by the world's largest multi-location brands across healthcare, dental, restaurants, financial services, auto, retail, and property management. G2 ranks Birdeye #1 in Enterprise Multi-Location Marketing Platforms and named it to the 2026 Best Agentic AI Products list. Learn more at birdeye.com.

About the Role

We are looking for a Senior Voice AI Engineer to build and scale next-generation conversational Voice AI systems. You will work on real-time, low-latency voice pipelines involving Speech-to-Text (STT), Large Language Models (LLMs), Text-to-Speech (TTS), WebRTC, telephony, and streaming infrastructure.

You should have hands-on experience building production-grade Voice AI agents using frameworks like Pipecat, LiveKit, or similar real-time communication platforms. This role requires a deep understanding of streaming architectures, WebSockets, voice quality optimization, interruption handling, and scalable backend systems.

Responsibilities

• Design and build production-grade Voice AI applications.
• Develop real-time streaming pipelines for voice conversations.
• Integrate STT, LLM, and TTS providers into low-latency conversational systems.
• Build robust WebSocket/WebRTC infrastructure for bi-directional audio streaming.
• Implement interruption handling (barge-in), turn detection, and Voice Activity Detection (VAD).
• Optimize latency across the complete voice pipeline.
• Integrate telephony providers such as Twilio, SIP, or LiveKit Telephony.
• Develop scalable backend services capable of supporting thousands of concurrent voice sessions.
• Design session management, state management, and conversation memory.
• Build monitoring, observability, and analytics for voice conversations.
• Deploy and operate Voice AI infrastructure on Kubernetes and cloud platforms.

Required Skills

Voice AI

• Strong understanding of conversational Voice AI systems
• Experience building real-time AI voice assistants
• Knowledge of latency optimization techniques
• Understanding of conversational memory and dialogue management

Speech Technologies

• Experience with OpenAI Realtime API, ElevenLabs, Deepgram, AssemblyAI, Google Speech, Azure Speech, Amazon Transcribe, Cartesia, or PlayHT
• Streaming STT and TTS
• Voice cloning and adaptive speech
• Speaker diarization
• Custom vocabulary and pronunciation dictionaries

Real-Time Communication

• Pipecat
• LiveKit
• WebRTC
• RTP
• SIP
• WebSockets
• Server-Sent Events (SSE)

Backend Development

• Python (preferred), FastAPI, AsyncIO
• WebSocket servers, gRPC, REST APIs
• Event-driven architecture
• Redis, Kafka, RabbitMQ
• PostgreSQL, MongoDB, ClickHouse (good to have)

Cloud & Infrastructure

• AWS, GCP, or Azure
• Docker
• Kubernetes
• NGINX
• Load Balancers
• Autoscaling
• CI/CD

Preferred Experience

• Built production Voice AI products
• Experience with Pipecat in production
• Experience with LiveKit Cloud or self-hosted LiveKit
• Experience with Twilio Voice or SIP infrastructure
• AI phone agents and call centre automation
• Noise suppression (Krisp, DeepFilterNet, RNNoise)
• Experience supporting 1,000+ concurrent voice sessions
• Multilingual Voice AI

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or related field from a Tier 1 institute.
• 6-8 years of software engineering experience.
• 3+ years building real-time streaming systems.
• 2+ years working on Voice AI or conversational AI products.
• Strong system design and distributed systems experience.