Cerence AI offers a path to shape the future of humanoid robotics with a flexible work approach in the San Francisco Bay Area or remote. The Principal Software Engineer role carries a compensation range of USD 165,550 to 264,450 per year, along with a comprehensive benefits package, equity opportunities for select roles, and a culture that emphasizes collaboration, impact, and practical robotics deployment. You will join a team that blends Voice AI, Agentic AI, and Physical AI to power the next generation of intelligent robots.
Responsibilities
- Application Layer & Business Logic: Develop high level application software, design interaction workflows, and implement the robot's behavioral state machines.
- Intent-to-Action Orchestration: Create the core logic that converts speech, gestures, environmental cues, and context into deterministic robotic tasks.
- Multi-Modal Interaction Fusion: Combine vision pipelines, object detection, scene understanding, spatial tracking, and voice interactions to deliver contextual awareness.
- Voice Application Engineering: Build robust voice applications handling speech-to-text, natural language understanding, dialog management, wake-word detection, and text-to-speech interfaces.
- Agentic AI Development: Develop orchestration workflows that bring together 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: Connect robots with mobile devices, smart home ecosystems, enterprise applications, and cloud APIs.
- Data Loop Contribution: Build telemetry, logging, and evaluation mechanisms to support continuous model improvement.
- Deployment & Production Readiness: Contribute to testing, observability, CI/CD, and production deployment practices.
Requirements
- Orchestration & Logic Frameworks: Strong proficiency with 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, API-driven systems, distributed services, and event-driven architectures.
- Edge Compute Management: Experience optimizing software on resource-constrained edge hardware with intermittent connectivity.
- 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.
Technologies
- BehaviorTree.CPP
- Python
- C++
- ROS2
- Docker
- Kubernetes
- OTA updates
- Whisper
- Deepgram
- Azure Speech
- ElevenLabs
- AWS Speech Services
Benefits
- Annual bonus opportunity
- Health insurance
- Dental insurance
- Vision insurance
- Disability insurance
- Life insurance
- Health savings account
- Paid time off
- Paid holidays
- Company contribution to the RRSP
- Equity awards for certain positions and levels
- Remote and/or hybrid work available depending on the position
- 401(k)
- Parental leave
Your Impact
Your work powers the next generation of intelligent humanoid robots. You will contribute to Voice AI, Agentic AI, LLMs, VLMs, and Physical AI products while collaborating with experts across robotics, conversational AI, embedded systems, and cloud computing. See your solutions deployed in real-world robotic environments that interact with people and environments.
Why Join the Team
Join a team building software that drives the future of humanoid robots. You will work across Voice AI, Agentic AI, Physical AI, and Conversational Systems, partnering with specialists in speech, AI, robotics, cloud, and embedded systems. This role helps shape the future of human-machine interaction with practical, impactful robotics deployments.
