Senior Software Engineer (CVI)

Tavus • Full-time • San Francisco, California, United States • $160k - $250k / year • 5d ago

About Us

At Tavus, we're building the human layer of AI. Our mission is to make human-AI interaction as natural as face-to-face interaction, enabling the human touch where it has been previously unscalable. We achieve this through pioneering research in multi-modal AI models for human perception and understanding, combined with state-of-the-art human avatar rendering and communication models. Our models power everything from text-to-video AI avatars to real-time conversational video experiences across industries like healthcare, recruiting, sales, education, and more. By enabling AI to see, hear, and communicate with human-like authenticity, we're creating the foundation for the next generation of AI employees, assistants, and companions.

We're a Series A company backed by top investors, including Sequoia, Y Combinator, and Scale VC. Join us in driving the future of human-AI interaction. Check it out for yourself 😎

The Role

We're hiring a Senior Software Engineer (CVI) to be a technical driver on the Tavus Conversational Video Interface product. This is a very hands-on role focused primarily on our multimodal real time conversational product.

This isn't your first rodeo - you've tackled ambiguous problems head on, you have strong opinions about architecture and interface design, and you know how to ship polished, reliable software. You'll work closely with product, and engineering leadership to build the future of human-computer interfaces, fast.

This role is ambiguous and you bring a swiss army knife of experience to cut through the ambiguity. Here are a few examples of features this role has shipped:

Multilingual support - which allows the replica to speak in multiple different languages within a single conversation
RAG and Memories - which lets the replica pull context from document stores and past conversations
Utterance to Utterance Optimization - shaving hundreds of milliseconds off utterance turns
IPC Standardization - centralizing the interface for inter process communication throughout the codebase

Your Mission 🚀

Jump into our existing CVI codebase and own the development and delivery of new features (ex: Voice localization for accent support, improve sentence endpointing for conversational smoothness, all features related to naturalness optimization)
Help shape the future for how users interact with our SoTA models by partnering closely with our Research team to integrate real time models into CVI
Contribute across the full product stack as needed, including dipping into research
Work with the team to nail reliability and uptime

Requirements

You are fluent in Python and have loads of experience with IPC, multiprocessing, and async frameworks. Low level concepts are dear friends
You're comfortable out of your normal comfort zone and are willing to learn on the fly
You thrives in an ambiguous and fast changing space. The state of the art changes on a dime and you react fast
You bring a senior mindset: you set direction, owns decisions, and get things over the finish line.
You communicate the complex with incredible clarity and leverage your communication abilities to teach others

Bonus if you have:

Deep experience with video streaming over WebRTC
Deep experience working with LLMs and agentic frameworks
Extensive experience with low level systems

Benefits

When you join Tavus, you’re joining a family. Our work is driven by our team, and our success is shared by all. This position has a flexible work schedule, unlimited PTO, competitive healthcare and gear stipends, as well as, of course, plenty of fun! At the end of the day, we want Tavus to be a place for you to learn, directly drive impact, and be with a team you love.

To learn more about our team culture, and benefits, check out our hiring page!

Tavus is growing fast, and we’d like you to grow with us! Are you excited to get your hands dirty? Drop your resume and we’ll be in touch!

We are not looking for cultural fits, we are looking for culture creators. In fact, diversity is what drives our success – it’s at the core of how we hire, communicate, and work. We are inclusive to all and combine our diverse backgrounds, skill sets, and thinking to build the best experiences for our clients.