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

  • NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Diarization: real-time speaker labels at a cent per audio hour

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

• Paid parental leave

• Fertility and family-building stipend through Carrot

• (U.S. only) Company-facilitated 401(k)