Principal Software Engineer (Real-Time Voice)

Join Parloa as a Principal Software Engineer for Voice/VoIP. In this hands-on technical leadership role, you will own the architecture and technical roadmap for our real-time voice infrastructure, ensuring it is fast, reliable, and ready to scale globally. You will work closely with infrastructure, AI/ML, and product teams, and mentor senior and staff engineers. The ideal candidate will have 10+ years of engineering experience, including 5+ years of hands-on experience with production Voice/VoIP, SIP, WebRTC, or carrier-grade voice infrastructure.

• Architect and lead the technical direction of the real-time voice infrastructure, ensuring low-latency and high-availability voice communication.
• Drive technical decisions on protocols and standards related to Voice/VoIP, and collaborate with AI/ML teams to optimize integration with conversational AI models.
• Mentor and guide senior and staff engineers, acting as a technical multiplier across the organization, and uphold engineering standards for reliability and security.
• Experience building or operating large-scale, distributed, real-time systems with strict latency and availability requirements
• 10+ years of engineering experience, including 5+ years hands-on building, operating, or debugging production Voice/VoIP, SIP, WebRTC, or carrier-grade voice infrastructure
• Strong systems programming skills in one or more of Go, C, C++ or Rust, with the ability to work at the media/transport layer
• Comfort operating in cloud environments (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and with container orchestration (Kubernetes)
• Strong knowledge of SIP, SDP, RTP/SRTP, RTCP, WebRTC, ICE, and real-time media transport protocols
• Experience instrumenting and operating voice-quality observability — call-quality metrics (e.g. MOS), per-leg call tracing, and diagnosing jitter, latency, and packet loss from telemetry
• A genuine interest in AI and conversational technology, and how voice infrastructure underpins it
• A track record of owning architecture for complex systems and driving technical decisions with broad organisational impact
• Deep, hands-on ownership of production SIP-based voice infrastructure at enterprise scale (e.g. Kamailio, FreeSWITCH, Asterisk, pjsip)
• Hands-on understanding of audio codecs and media behavior, including Opus, G.711/G.722, codec negotiation/transcoding, DTMF/RFC2833, jitter buffers, packetization, and codec-related quality/latency trade-offs
• Excellent communication skills — able to explain complex technical trade-offs to engineers and non-engineers alike
• Experience working with telephony carriers, SIP trunk providers, or PSTN integrations at scale