PMTS Architect

Voice Agent Platform Architect

Payrate: $155.00 - $160.00/hr summary:
You will own the architecture and design of the platform behind product's voice agent — a native mobile voice/AI assistant experience inside the Company Product's mobile ecosystem. This is production work, not prototyping: your services, APIs, and pipelines must meet the bar of Product's production codebase — modular, tested, linted, accessible, and performant at Product's scale (tens of millions of users).

The Product is an extremely design-driven organization. Every hire, engineering included, must have demonstrable design sensibility and experience working within (or adjacent to) a mature design system. As the principal engineer on the project, you set the technical standard that our iOS and Android client engineers build against.

• Own end-to-end architecture and technical design for the voice agent platform: service decomposition, API contracts, data models, failure modes, and latency/capacity budgets for real-time conversational experiences.
• Design, build, and operate the RESTful web services that power the voice agent — voice capture/playback backends, streaming agent responses, session state, and deep integration with Product's mobile apps — and integrate with (and help modernize) existing SOAP-based enterprise web services in the CIO organization.
• Architect real-time communication layers (Web Sockets/streaming APIs) for low-latency voice and agent responses: connection management, back pressure, reconnection, and graceful degradation.
• Define the client–service contracts that iOS and Android engineers implement against; review client integration code for architectural soundness.
• Own CI/CD and build infrastructure:
  Jenkins pipelines (declarative pipelines, shared libraries), Maven builds and artifact management, quality gates, feature flags, and staged rollouts.
• Lead design reviews and code reviews to Product's standards; author architecture decision records; mentor senior engineers on the team.
• Collaborate daily with design and product — ensuring voice interaction states (listening/thinking/speaking/error/interruption) are technically realized to spec, not approximately.

• 10 years of software engineering experience, operating at principal/architect level on large-scale distributed systems — a demonstrated track record of architecture and design ownership, not just implementation.
• Expert-level REST API design (versioning, pagination, error models, idempotency, authN/authZ) and working fluency with SOAP/WSDL enterprise web services, including migrating or wrapping SOAP services behind modern REST interfaces.
• Production experience with real-time systems:
  Web Sockets, streaming APIs, low-latency backends; voice/audio streaming experience is a strong plus.
• Deep JVM services background (Java and/or Kotlin) with expert-level Maven (multi-module builds, dependency management, plugin configuration) and Jenkins (pipeline-as-code, shared libraries, scaling build infrastructure).
• Experience building and operating services consumed by mobile clients — you understand what iOS/Android teams need from an API contract.
• Shipped and maintained systems at 100K MAU minimum; 1M MAU strongly preferred — with the observability, incident discipline, and phased-release experience that scale demands.
• Rigorous testing culture: unit, integration, and contract testing embedded in CI;
  Git-based code review culture.
• Design sensibility: experience working within or adjacent to a mature design system at a design-driven company.

• Prior work at a company with a strong, recognized design language — e.g., Apple, Airbnb, Duolingo, Linear, Figma, Notion, Stripe, Cash App/Block, Headspace, Robinhood, Vercel.
• Voice/conversational AI product experience (e.g., OpenAI, Character.ai, Replika, Siri/Alexa teams): ASR/TTS integration, LLM streaming backends, token-streaming architectures, WebRTC.
• Hands-on familiarity with Swift/iOS or Kotlin/Android — enough to review client-side integration with empathy and precision.
• Experience in enterprise/CIO-organization environments: security, compliance, and governance requirements for internal-facing…