Embedded AI Engineer, On-Device Models

COMPANY OVERVIEW

The company is bringing the world’s most natural interface, voice, to the technology we use every day. Our speech models and real-time infrastructure power AI systems that keep up with the way people actually speak. More than 5,000 organizations run conversational voice AI on the company in production, including Twilio, Cloudflare, Sierra, Decagon, Vapi, Cresta, Granola, and Jack in the Box.

The company Voice Agent Platform brings together speech-to-text, text-to-speech and speech-to-speech, with voice-native foundation models available through cloud APIs or self-hosted and on-premises deployments. Built for accuracy, low latency and cost efficiency, the company makes high-quality voice experiences practical to build and run at scale. More than 650,000 developers have used the company to process more than 200,000 years of audio. Every day, more of the world’s conversations with AI run on our models.

AI-FIRST BY DEFAULT

At the company, we expect an AI-first mindset—AI use and comfort aren’t optional, they’re core to how we operate, innovate, and measure performance.

Every team member who works at the company is expected to actively use and experiment with advanced AI tools, and even build your own into your everyday work. We measure how effectively AI is applied to deliver results, and consistent, creative use of the latest AI capabilities is key to success here. Candidates should be comfortable adopting new models and modes quickly, integrating AI into their workflows, and continuously pushing the boundaries of what these technologies can do.

Additionally, we move at the pace of AI. Change is rapid, and you can expect your day-to-day work to evolve just as quickly. If you’re energized by experimenting, adapting, and learning constantly, you’ll thrive here. Expect your day-to-day to evolve as fast as the technology does.

ABOUT THE ROLE

The company's speech models are among the fastest and most accurate in the world, and we have deep machinery for running them on NVIDIA GPUs. Our customers need them on everything else: non-NVIDIA accelerators, embedded SoCs, mobile application processors, DSPs and NPUs, and purpose-built devices with tight memory, compute, thermal, and power budgets. When a target platform's standard kernels and runtime can't run the company model well enough, someone has to go below them. That is this role.

As an Embedded AI Engineer on the Partner Platform Engineering team, you work at the lowest layer of our edge stack. You write and optimize custom kernels and operators for specific hardware, collapse models onto device-specific execution units, and do the target-side quantization and assembly-level tuning that standard toolchains can't. You hand what you build up to Applied ML Engineers, who fit the company models to your kernels. Your work is what makes a new hardware platform viable for the company at all.

This role is a great fit for a senior embedded engineer who has spent their career close to the metal and wants to point that at speech AI, or a staff-level engineer who wants to define how the company's models get onto new silicon. We'll set the level to your experience.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Write and optimize custom kernels and operators (C, C++, Rust, and platform assembly or intrinsics) for non-NVIDIA accelerators, embedded SoCs, DSPs, and NPUs where the vendor's standard operator set is insufficient for the company models.

• Own target-side optimization: collapse models onto device execution units through quantization, operator fusion, memory layout, and architecture-specific compilation to meet latency, memory, power, and thermal budgets.

• Integrate with vendor NPU/DSP toolchains and edge inference runtimes, and extend them with custom operators when the graph doesn't map cleanly.

• Deliver kernels and runtime components as reusable building blocks that Applied ML Engineers can target when adapting models, with clear interfaces and documented constraints.

• Build performance-critical runtime code for embedded environments, including embedded Linux, bare-metal, and RTOS targets.

• Establish per-platform benchmarking and validation for latency, accuracy, power, memory footprint, and utilization, and catch regressions before they ship.

• Partner with silicon and platform vendors on SDK integration and low-level performance tuning for new chipsets and reference platforms.

• Feed hardware constraints back to Applied ML and Research so model designs are easier to land on constrained targets.

YOU'LL LOVE THIS ROLE IF YOU

• Find deep satisfaction in making a large model run on hardware that was never meant to run it, and still hitting accuracy and latency targets.

• Reach for the profiler and the ISA manual before you reach for a bigger chip.

• Would rather write the kernel than wait for the vendor to ship it.

• Care about the details that don't show up in a cloud benchmark: cold start, power draw, thermals, memory fragmentation, cache behavior.

• Prefer hard, constrained, ship-it problems over open-ended research.

• Care about the details that don't show up in a cloud benchmark: cold-start time, power draw, thermals, and memory fragmentation.

IT'S IMPORTANT TO US THAT YOU HAVE

• Experience delivering production systems on resource-constrained hardware — embedded systems, mobile, edge AI, or small low-power devices.

• Strong proficiency in C, C++, and/or Rust, with experience writing performance-critical code for constrained environments.

• Hands-on experience with model optimization for on-device deployment, including quantization, pruning, knowledge distillation, or architecture-specific compilation.

• Familiarity with edge inference runtimes (e.g., ONNX Runtime, TensorRT, TFLite, ExecuTorch) and/or vendor-specific NPU/DSP toolchains.

• A strong understanding of hardware-software interaction — CPU/GPU/NPU/DSP architectures, memory hierarchies, fixed-point/integer arithmetic, and power management — and how they affect inference performance.

• Experience working close to the metal: bare-metal or RTOS environments (e.g., FreeRTOS, Zephyr), embedded Linux, or microcontroller and edge SoC development.

• Strong communication skills and a builder mindset — you can scope an ambiguous optimization problem, drive it to a measurable result, and explain the tradeoffs clearly.

IT WOULD BE GREAT IF YOU HAD

• Experience with real-time audio processing on embedded platforms — DSP pipelines, audio codec optimization, wake-word or always-on listening, or streaming inference on microcontrollers and edge SoCs.

• Depth in ML optimization techniques — custom quantization schemes, mixed-precision inference, or neural architecture search for edge targets.

• Background in hardware evaluation and benchmarking — systematically comparing accelerators, SoCs, or GPUs for specific workload profiles.

• Experience shipping AI features in consumer products at scale, and the instinct for what "production quality" means on a battery-powered device.

• Familiarity with model compilation and optimization toolchains and their tradeoffs across hardware targets.

• Experience with secure, robust on-device deployment practices — code signing, encrypted model storage, and safe update mechanisms.

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