Senior Backend Software Engineer, Solve Voice

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, because behind every interaction lies an opportunity to make a human connection.

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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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. While this range reflects the minimum and maximum value for new hire salaries for the position across all US locations, the offer for the successful candidate for this position will be based on job related capabilities, applicable experience, and other factors such as work location. Please note that the compensation details listed in US role postings reflect the base salary only (or OTE for commissions based roles), and do not include bonus, benefits, or related incentives.

The intelligent heart of customer experience

Zendesk software was built to bring a sense of calm to the chaotic world of customer service. Today we power billions of conversations with brands you know and love.

Zendesk believes in offering our people a fulfilling and inclusive experience. Our hybrid way of working, enables us to purposefully come together in person, at one of our many Zendesk offices around the world, to connect, collaborate and learn whilst also giving our people the flexibility to work remotely for part of the week.

As part of our commitment to fairness and transparency, we inform all applicants that artificial intelligence (AI) or automated decision systems may be used to screen or evaluate applications for this position, in accordance with Company guidelines and applicable law.