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San Jose, California, United States
Hybrid
Principal 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 Principal 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 Inc. (Nasdaq: CRNC and www.cerence.com) is the global industry leader in creating unique, moving experiences for the automotive world. Spun out from Nuance in October 2019, Cerence is a new, independent company that has quickly gained traction as a leader in the automotive voice assistant space, working with all of the world’s leading automakers – from Ford and Fiat Chrysler to Daimler, Audi and BMW to Geely and SAIC – to transform how a car feels, responds and learns. Its track record is built on more than 20 years of industry experience and leadership and more than 500 million cars on the road today across more than 70 languages.
As Cerence looks to the future and continues an ambitious growth agenda, we need someone to join the team and help build the future of voice and AI in cars. This is an exciting opportunity to join Cerence’s passionate, dedicated, global team and be a part of meaningful innovation in a rapidly growing industry.
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.
