Staff Software Engineer

Job description

About the role We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer to set technical direction across multiple teams and raise the bar for how we build real-time voice AI. You'll own our hardest cross-cutting problems: the architecture of a platform that runs in live conversations, reliability and latency at production scale and developer velocity across our Desktop App, SDK, Voice Gateway and Portal. As Sanas expands beyond contact centers into telecom, enterprise communication and custom voice products, your architectural decisions will shape how the platform scales. This is a senior individual contributor role, not a management track. You'll stay hands-on in the code while multiplying the impact of the engineers around you. What you'll do Set technical direction. Define and drive architecture across our client (Desktop App / SDK), gateway and cloud backend systems. Balance near-term customer delivery against long-term scalability as we move from contact centers into telecom and enterprise. Own real-time performance. Treat end-to-end latency, audio quality, CPU and memory footprint and uptime as first-class requirements. Our products run live on customer calls, where regressions are immediately audible. Lead cross-team initiatives. Take ambiguous, high-impact problems that span the SDK, backend, ML inference and DevOps teams, turn them into clear plans and see them through to production. Stay hands-on. Write and review production code, prototype new approaches and dig into the hardest bugs across the client, backend services and deployment layers. Make decisions visible. Write design docs and architecture decision records that explain the reasoning behind technical choices. Raise the bar. Establish and model best practices for code quality, testing, observability, security and operational excellence. Mentor and grow engineers. Coach senior and mid-level engineers and help shape how we interview and level technical talent. Partner beyond engineering. Work with Product, Research/ML, Customer Success and leadership to shape the roadmap, surface technical risks early and support enterprise customer and technical requirements. Qualifications Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or a related field. 8-12+ years of professional software engineering experience, including significant time at a senior or staff level. A track record of designing and shipping large-scale, low-latency systems that served real users and held up in production. Deep expertise in one or more of Rust, Python & GoLang with strong command of distributed systems and RESTful API design. Hands-on experience with AWS, Docker and Kubernetes (preferably EKS), CI/CD and modern observability tooling. Familiarity with databases such as PostgreSQL and ClickHouse. The ability to lead through influence: aligning stakeholders, resolving technical disagreements and driving outcomes without formal authority. Clear written and verbal communication, including explaining complex tradeoffs to engineers and non-technical partners. Sound judgment about when to build for the long term and when to ship pragmatically. Preferred Qualifications Experience with real-time audio, speech, VoIP/SIP, WebRTC, or telephony systems. Experience productionizing ML inference on-device or in the cloud with tight latency budgets. Experience with cross-platform desktop application or SDK development. Experience with Kafka or other event-driven platforms and with Terraform or other infrastructure-as-code tools. Experience scaling a system through an order-of-magnitude increase in load at a high-growth startup. Exposure to enterprise security and compliance requirements (SOC 2, ISO 27001). Ability to rapidly develop high-quality code with AI copilots (like Claude) using spec-driven development methods. Contributions to open source, technical writing, or conference talks. What Success Looks Like First 90 days: You understand our real-time pipeline end to end, from client and SDK through gateway to cloud. You've shipped meaningful code and identified the top technical risks and opportunities. Within 6 months: You're leading at least one cross-team initiative end to end and your design reviews and mentorship are visibly lifting the team. Within 12 months: The architecture you've shaped makes teams faster and systems more reliable as Sana Sanas is pioneering the future of human communication. Founded by a team of Stanford researchers and entrepreneurs with deep industry experience, Sanas has developed the world's first real-time speech AI platform capable of accent translation, noise cancellation, speech enhancement, cross-language communication, and more. Sanas makes conversations clearer, more inclusive, and more effective, removing barriers that prevent people from being understood, regardless of accent, background noise, or native language. Sanas is currently one of the fastest growing startups in Silicon Valley, growing from $16M to $50M ARR in 2025. The company's core business is profitable and is on track to end 2026 with >$77M ARR. Our team combines deep expertise in model innovation and systems engineering with a design-minded product engineering culture to build and ship cutting-edge AI models and experiences — entirely in-house. Sanas is a 130 person team, established in 2020. In this short span, we've successfully secured over $100 million in funding. Our innovation has been supported by the industry's leading investors, including Insight Partners, Google Ventures, Quadrille Capital, General Catalyst, Quiet Capital, and other influential investors. Our reputation is further solidified by collaborations with numerous Fortune 100 companies. With Sanas, you're not just adopting a product; you're investing in the future of communication. If you’re looking to have a significant role in roadmapping and driving technical directions, if you’re looking to deploy challenging and big ideas without much overhead or slowness, if you're looking to leave your mark on an ambitious, generational mission to change how the worlds thinks about speech + AI, then Sanas is a well-suited place for you.