Software Engineer, Channels and Experiences

About this role

ABOUT US

Sierra is the leading platform for customer-facing AI agents, working with many of the world's biggest brands — including The GAP, Rocket Mortgage, SoFi, Sutter Health, and SoftBank — to transform how they serve customers and grow their businesses. We are primarily an in-person company based in San Francisco, with growing offices across North America, Europe, and Asia.

We are guided by a set of values that are at the core of our actions and define our culture: Trust, Customer Obsession, Craftsmanship, Intensity, and a commitment to balancing Family along the way. These values are the foundation of our work, and we are committed to upholding them in everything we do.

Our co-founders are Bret Taylor https://www.linkedin.com/in/brettaylor/ and Clay Bavor https://www.linkedin.com/in/claybavor/. Bret currently serves as Board Chair of OpenAI. Previously, he was co-CEO of Salesforce (which had acquired the company he founded, Quip) and CTO of Facebook. Bret was also one of Google's earliest product managers and co-creator of Google Maps. Before founding Sierra, Clay spent 18 years at Google, where he most recently led Google Labs. Earlier, he started and led Google’s AR/VR effort, Project Starline, and Google Lens. Before that, Clay led the product and design teams for Google Workspace.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

When someone calls an airline, texts a retailer, or opens their bank's app and talks to a Sierra agent, our systems carry that conversation. Phone calls, SMS, WhatsApp, email, and the chat inside our customers' apps all run through this team.

AI voice, chat, and messaging agents are new and they must operate with global communication networks. Nobody has fully solved how to make the two work together at the speed of a real conversation. We have to solve it for millions of calls, and you will be building the future of how entire industries will operate with AI agents.

Demo: Finding the perfect stay https://sierra.ai/resources/videos/demo-finding-the-perfect-stay

Demo: Flight disruption recovery https://sierra.ai/resources/videos/demo-flight-disruption-recovery

- Multi-modal: Make one conversation work across voice, text, and screen. A customer can start by talking, switch to typing on a crowded train, send a photo of a broken part, and get a link or a form back on screen. The agent remembers everything, whichever way the customer talks and personalizes it. You will build on the frontier here, and decide what it should feel like.

- Make AI voice feel like a real conversation. Every call crosses carriers, telephony networks, and contact centers around the world before it reaches our agent. Making AI agents feel lively and real across global infrastructure is a critical problem to get right for end users.

- Give personal AI agents a safe way in. More people now have their own AI assistants. Today a company can either block them or hand them the user’s full account access. The Personal Agent Protocol https://personalagentprotocol.org/ is an open standard that offers a better option: a safe way for personal agents to work with a company and its Sierra agent. You’ll help build it.

- Build the agent experience inside the app. ChatKit is our library of native iOS, Android, and web components for talking to an agent. It covers voice controls, live waveforms, transcripts, and chat. Customers use it to build an agent experience inside a customer’s flagship app, not like a widget added on top. You decide what those components are and how they behave.

- Get every call to the right agent. You’ll build and own our global telephony stack: SIP, WebRTC, the Sierra Voice Protocol and our integrations with major contact-center platforms. That means millions of calls and messages, and every one of them reaching the right agent.

- Put Sierra on every channel. SMS, WhatsApp, RCS, email, LINE, Messenger and Instagram. You’ll build the tools that let developers launch a new channel on their own, delivering value in hours not weeks.

WHAT OWNERSHIP LOOKS LIKE

- A bias for shipping. You move fast, and you finish what you start.

- Curiosity about the hard parts. You go deep where other engineers avoid going: protocols, edge cases, and end to end multi-modal experiences.

- An AI-native way of building. You not only use AI tools every day, it is ingrained in the way you operate and think. You’ve deleted all old priors and re-invented the way you and your teams work from the ground up. Come ready to tell us about something you built that you couldn’t have built 6 months ago.

- An obsession with the details. When one call in ten thousand fails, you want to know why. You obsess about the product experience and pixels as much as you do latency and reliability.

- Strong backend fundamentals. You can also work comfortably across backend, infra, mobile and web.

- 3+ years building production software that real users depend on.

WHAT YOU'LL BRING

- A passion for being on the frontier of AI products.

- Pride in building reliable, maintainable, and secure systems that scale.

- Motivation and high-agency to drive outcomes in a high-autonomy culture.

- 4+ years hands-on experience building production systems.

- Degree in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent professional experience.

EVEN BETTER...

- Experience building AI products for enterprise or consumers

- Experience building native SDKs for iOS (Swift) or Android (Kotlin)

- Experience building messaging apps, voice apps or voice agents

- Experience with SIP, WebRTC, Twilio or contact-center platforms

- Experience with real-time, low-latency distributed systems

None of these are required. If the problems above excite you, we’d love to hear from you.

OUR VALUES

- Trust: We build trust with our customers with our accountability, empathy, quality, and responsiveness. We build trust in AI by making it more accessible, safe, and useful. We build trust with each other by showing up for each other…