Software Engineer - Channels and Experiences

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.

Sierra was co-founded by Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor who first met while working together at Google over 20 years ago. Bret currently serves as Chairman of the Board of Open AI. Previously, he was co-CEO of Salesforce and CTO of Facebook. Clay spent 18 years at Google, where he most recently led Google Labs.

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

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 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 professionally and personally, creating an environment that enables all of us to do our best work.

• Customer Obsession: We deeply understand our customers’ business goals and relentlessly focus on driving outcomes, not just technical milestones. Everyone at the company knows and spends time with our customers. When our customer is having an issue, we drop everything and fix it.

• Craftsmanship: We get the details right, from the words on the page to the system architecture. We have good taste. When we notice something isn’t right, we take the time to fix it. We are proud of the products we produce. We continuously self-reflect to continuously self-improve.

• Intensity: We know we don’t have the luxury of patience. We play to win. We care about our product being the best, and when it isn’t, we fix it. When we fail, we talk about it openly and without blame so we succeed the next time.

• Family: We know that balance and intensity are compatible, and we model it in our actions and processes. We are the best technology company for parents. We support and respect each other and celebrate each other’s personal and professional achievements.

What we offer

We want our benefits to reflect our values and offer the following to full-time employees:

• Flexible (unlimited) paid time off

• Medical, dental, and vision benefits for you and your family

• Life insurance and disability benefits

• Retirement plan dependent on country of employment

• Parental leave

• Fertility and family building benefits

• Lunch, as well as delicious snacks and coffee to keep you energized when working onsite

• Discretionary benefit stipend giving people the ability to spend where it matters most

• Free alphorn lessons

These benefits are further detailed in Sierra's policies, may vary by region and employment type, and are subject to change at any time, consistent with the terms of any applicable compensation or benefits plans. Eligible full-time employees can participate in Sierra's equity plans subject to the terms of the applicable plans and policies.

Be you, with us

We're working to bring the transformative power of AI to every organization in the world. To do so, it is important to us that the diversity of our employees represents the diversity of our customers. We believe that our work and culture are better when we encourage, support, and respect different skills and experiences represented within our team. We encourage you to apply through the link on this page even if your experience doesn't precisely match the job description.

Sierra is a proud equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to any characteristic protected by applicable federal, state or local laws, including veteran status and disability status. Hiring decisions are made by people, based on merit. If you need a reasonable accommodation for a disability, a religious practice, pregnancy or any related condition at any point in the application or interview process, contact us at [email protected]. Requests are handled confidentially and do not affect your candidacy.

We will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records in accordance with applicable fair chance laws.