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San Jose, California, United States
Hybrid
AI That Moves the World. Careers That Move You Forward.
At Cerence AI, you’ll help transform advanced AI into trusted, real-world solutions that make complex technology – think vehicles, robots, smart manufacturing, and emerging intelligent devices – more natural, reliable, and useful. Building on decades of innovation and global deployment in automotive, we are extending our expertise into new products, markets, and intelligent systems.
As part of our global team, you’ll work alongside leading innovators, researchers, engineers, and business leaders to solve meaningful challenges and turn breakthrough ideas into technology people use every day. You’ll have the opportunity to make a visible impact, help shape Cerence AI’s next chapter, and move your own career forward.
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Sr. Software Engineer – Robot Applications & Voice AI
Location : California Bay area
Humanoid robots become truly useful when they understand human intent and convert it into meaningful action. At Cerence, we are building the cognitive and application layer that combines Voice AI, Agentic AI, multimodal reasoning, and robotic capabilities into intuitive human-robot experiences.
Role Overview
The Sr. Software Engineer drives the application and cognitive layer of our humanoid robot. Working directly with the core robotics platform designed by our Architect, you will turn human intent into high-level physical actions. This role focuses on building advanced voice applications, multi-modal context systems, and programming the core business logic and behavior trees that make the robot interactive, helpful, and intuitive.
Your Impact
Key Responsibilities
Application Layer & Business Logic: Implement high-level application software, interaction workflows, and robotic behavioral state machines.
Intent-to-Action Orchestration: Build the core logic that translates human speech, gestures, environmental cues, and contextual information into deterministic robotic tasks.
Multi-Modal Interaction Fusion: Integrate vision pipelines, object detection, scene understanding, spatial tracking, and voice interactions to provide contextual awareness.
Voice Application Engineering: Develop robust voice applications managing STT, NLU, dialog management, wake-word detection, and TTS interfaces.
Agentic AI Development: Build orchestration workflows combining 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: Integrate robots with mobile devices, smart home ecosystems, enterprise applications, and cloud APIs.
Data Loop Contribution: Build telemetry, logging, and evaluation mechanisms supporting continuous model improvement.
Deployment & Production Readiness: Contribute to testing, observability, CI/CD, and production deployment practices.
Required Skills & Experience
Mandatory (Must Have)
Good to Have (Highly Valued Plus)
Why Join the Team
What we offer
Education & Qualifications
Cerence AI (NASDAQ: CRNC) helps people and intelligent systems work together naturally and reliably. Proven at global scale in automotive, Cerence provides the trusted interaction and action layer connecting people, machines, and intelligent systems. Its AI platform enables natural interaction and dependable action across complex real-world environments where reliability, safety, security, and performance are critical. Working with customers and partners worldwide, Cerence transforms advanced AI into trusted solutions that bridge the gap between AI potential and real-world performance.
For more information, visit www.cerence.ai.
Cerence is firmly committed to Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) and to compliance with all federal, state and local laws that prohibit employment discrimination on the basis of age, race, color, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sex, sex stereotyping, pregnancy, national origin, ancestry, religion, physical or mental disability, medical condition, marital status, citizenship status, sexual orientation, protected military or veteran status, genetic information and other protected classifications. Cerence Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.
All prospective and current Employees need to remain vigilant when it comes to executing security policies in the workplace. This includes:
- Following workplace security protocols and training programs to familiarize with the ways to maintain a safe workplace.
- Following security procedures to report any suspicious activity.
- Having respect for corporate security procedures to allow those procedures to be effective.
- Adhering to company's compliance and regulations.
- Encouraging to follow a zero tolerance for workplace violence.
- Basic knowledge of information security and data privacy requirements (e.g., how to protect data & how to be handling this data).
- Demonstrative knowledge of information security through internal training programs.
