Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Cerence AI is a global leader in conversational AI and voice technologies, expanding innovations beyond automotive into robotics and physical AI. The Principal Software Engineer will drive the application and cognitive layer of humanoid robots, focusing on building advanced voice applications and programming the core business logic to create intuitive human-robot experiences.
Responsibilities
- Implement high-level application software, interaction workflows, and robotic behavioral state machines
- Build the core logic that translates human speech, gestures, environmental cues, and contextual information into deterministic robotic tasks
- Integrate vision pipelines, object detection, scene understanding, spatial tracking, and voice interactions to provide contextual awareness
- Develop robust voice applications managing STT, NLU, dialog management, wake-word detection, and TTS interfaces
- Build orchestration workflows combining LLMs, VLMs, memory systems, tool calling, reasoning engines, and robotic capabilities
- Consume and orchestrate navigation, manipulation, perception, and device-control services exposed by the robotics platform
- Optimize applications to balance low-latency local execution with cloud-based AI services
- Integrate robots with mobile devices, smart home ecosystems, enterprise applications, and cloud APIs
- Build telemetry, logging, and evaluation mechanisms supporting continuous model improvement
- Contribute to testing, observability, CI/CD, and production deployment practices
Skills
- 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
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Robotics, Software Engineering, AI, or a related discipline
- 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
Benefits
- Annual bonus opportunity
- Insurance coverage (medical, dental, vision, life, and disability)
- Paid time off
- Paid holidays
- Company contribution to the RRSP (Registered Retirement Savings Plan)
- Equity awards for certain positions and levels
- Remote and/or hybrid work available depending on the position
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