Director, Engineering (Voice)

We’re looking for a seasoned engineering leader to own and drive our Voice Platform – a core part of our Agentic Customer Experience (CX) platform powering voice communication experiences on a global scale. You will architect and scale carrier-grade voice services with high reliability and excellent audio quality, enabling cloud telephony and intelligent voice features for our customers. This role is based in India (Bengaluru or Chennai) and will lead a local engineering team as part of our global Product & Technology organization. You’ll work cross-functionally to ensure the voice platform seamlessly integrates with our broader CX platform, and you will report directly to the VP/GM of Data & Intelligence Platform.

Responsibilities:

• Voice Platform Strategy & Execution: Define the engineering vision, roadmap, and priorities for our core voice/telephony platform. Drive the development of core call processing systems (e.g., SIP servers, media servers) and features that enhance our voice communication capabilities. Ensure the platform meets the needs of various products and partners and continuously innovate to stay ahead in voice technology.
• Team Leadership (Global Collaboration): Build and lead a high-performing engineering team (based in Bengaluru/Chennai) focused on the Voice Platform. Mentor and develop engineers, foster an inclusive and innovative team culture, and align the team’s work with business goals. Coordinate closely with peer teams in Europe and the US to ensure a “follow-the-sun” model for development and operations, leveraging our distributed global team for continuous progress.
• Voice Quality & Signal Processing: Manage and fine-tune the digital signal processing components crucial for voice quality. Oversee configurations and optimizations of audio codecs, echo cancellation, noise suppression, jitter buffers, and other DSP techniques to deliver crystal-clear voice interactions[1]. Continuously improve call clarity and minimize latency or audio artifacts, ensuring excellent call quality even under challenging network conditions.
• Reliability & Performance (Five-Nines): Champion reliability, scalability, and performance of the voice platform. Architect and operate systems to achieve 999% (five-nines) uptime for voice services globally[2], through resilient infrastructure design, redundancy, and proactive monitoring. Implement best practices in performance tuning, load balancing, and capacity planning so that our telephony services remain highly available and low latency as traffic scales.
• Architecture & Integration: Guide the evolution of our voice platform architecture, moving toward modular, cloud-native components (e.g., containerized microservices for call control and media handling). Make key technical decisions around VoIP technologies (SIP, WebRTC, SBCs, media gateways) and ensure the voice platform integrates seamlessly with other parts of the Agentic CX platform. Work with platform architects to maintain strong APIs/SDKs and integration points so voice services can be easily consumed by other products and teams.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work closely with cross-functional teams to deliver end-to-end value. Partner with Product Management to align voice platform enhancements with market needs and product features. Collaborate with Reliability Engineering and Operations on meeting SLOs for call quality and uptime, and with Security/Compliance on implementing voice encryption, fraud prevention, and regulatory requirements (e.g., emergency calling compliance). Coordinate with Data & AI teams to enable real-time analytics or AI features (such as speech-to-text or voice bots) that leverage the voice platform. Communicate effectively with stakeholders across Product, Engineering, and Customer Support to ensure the voice platform’s success.

First 12 Months – Goals & Outcomes:

• Deliver Platform Improvements: Launch an enhanced version of the voice platform in production, achieving measurable improvements in reliability and call quality. This includes hitting targeted uptime (striving for 99.999% availability) and reducing incident rates, so that our voice services deliver a truly carrier-grade experience for customers.
• Advance Voice Quality & DSP: Implement key audio quality enhancements. For example, deploy new or improved signal processing algorithms (upgraded noise cancellation, better jitter buffer tuning, richer codec support) that lead to higher call clarity and better Mean Opinion Scores (MOS). Establish metrics and monitoring for voice quality (e.g., packet loss, jitter, MOS) and use them to drive continuous refinements.
• Scale Globally with Reliability: Expand and optimize the global infrastructure for voice. Set up or improve redundant voice nodes across regions (India, EU, North America) to ensure low latency and failover coverage worldwide. By year-end, the platform should gracefully handle peak loads and automatically recover from outages, verified by successful chaos testing or disaster recovery drills.
• Strengthen Observability & Operations: Build world-class observability for the voice platform. In the first 12 months, put in place comprehensive monitoring of dashboards and alerts for call performance and system health. Define SLIs/SLOs for voice (e.g., call setup time, dropped call rate) and implement on-call processes and runbooks so that any platform issues are detected and resolved rapidly. Conduct post-mortems for incidents and drive the follow-up actions, improving our mean time to resolve (MTTR) and overall service robustness.
• Grow and Empower the Team: Hire and onboard key engineering talent to expand the voice platform team. Establish effective team processes (Agile rituals, design/code review practices, on-call rotations) and solidify the culture of accountability and innovation. Mentor existing team members toward greater ownership. By month 12, have a fully staffed team in India that is tightly integrated with our wider org and consistently delivering on roadmap commitments.
• Cross-Team Alignment: Develop strong working relationships with peer leaders and stakeholders. For example, hold regular syncs with the Data & Intelligence group to plan how voice platform data feeds into AI initiatives. Coordinate with Product and Customer Success on a feedback loop for voice features and platform stability. Ensure that by the end of the first year, the voice platform’s direction is well understood and supported across the company.

Qualifications:

• Experience & Leadership: 10+ years in software engineering, including 5+ years in leading teams or managing engineers[3]. Proven success in delivering complex, mission-critical systems (ideally in real-time communications or telecom domains) at scale. Experience hiring, mentoring, and growing engineering teams, with the ability to inspire and guide technical talent.
• VoIP and Telephony Expertise: Deep knowledge of voice over IP (VoIP) and telephony systems. Hands-on experience with SIP/RTP protocols, call signaling, and media streaming is needed. Familiarity with carrier-grade voice platforms and components such as FreeSwitch, Kamailio (or similar SIP proxies), Session Border Controllers, and PSTN/SIP trunking[4]. Ability to design and troubleshoot call flows, dialing plans, and telephony integrations.
• Audio/Signal Processing: Strong understanding of audio DSP techniques for voice communications. Experience optimizing voice quality through echo cancellation, noise reduction, packet jitter buffering, voice activity detection, and codec tuning[5]. Comfortable working with audio codecs (e.g., Opus, G.711/G.729, etc.) and enhancing call quality under varying network conditions.
• Distributed Systems & Cloud: Demonstrated ability to design and operate distributed, highly available systems (multi-region or multi-data center deployments). Solid experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS, Azure or GCP) and container orchestration (Docker/Kubernetes) for deploying scalable microservices[6] [7]. Knowledge of network fundamentals (TCP/UDP, load balancing, NAT traversal) and experience implementing failover and disaster recovery for global services.
• Operational Excellence: Hands-on experience with DevOps and SRE best practices. Proficient in CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and infrastructure-as-code. Has set up monitoring/alerting for production systems and managed on-call rotations. Track record of improving reliability and performance in a 24/7, zero-downtime environment[8]. Strong problem-solving skills with a “diagnose and fix” mindset for complex, time-sensitive issues.
• Collaboration & Communication: Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills. Ability to work cross-functionally with product managers, designers, QA, and operations teams to drive projects to completion. Experience in a global team environment is a plus – adept at coordinating across time zones and cultures. Fluent in articulating technical concepts to non-technical audiences and in translating business requirements into actionable engineering plans.
• Education: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent practical experience). A Master’s degree or specialization in telecommunications, networking, or distributed systems is a bonus.

Nextiva DNA (Core Competencies)

Nextiva’s most successful team members share common traits and behaviors:

• Drives Results: Action-oriented with a passion for solving problems. They bring clarity and simplicity to ambiguous situations, challenge the status quo, and ask what can be done differently. They lead and drive change, celebrating success to build more success.
• Critical Thinker: Understands the "why" and identifies key drivers, learning from the past. They are fact-based and data-driven, forward-thinking, and see problems a few steps ahead. They provide options, recommendations, and actions, understanding risks and dependencies.
• Right Attitude: They are team-oriented, collaborative, competitive, and hate losing. They are resilient, able to bounce back from setbacks, zoom in and out, and get in the trenches to help solve important problems. They cultivate a culture of service, learning, support, and respect, caring for customers and teams.

Total Rewards

Our Total Rewards offerings are designed to allow our employees to take care of themselves and their families so they can be their best, in and out of the office.

Our compensation packages are tailored to each role and candidate's qualifications. We consider a wide range of factors, including skills, experience, training, and certifications, when determining compensation. We aim to offer competitive salaries or wages that reflect the value you bring to our team. Depending on the position, compensation may include base salary and/or hourly wages, incentives, or bonuses.

• Medical 🩺 - Medical insurance coverage is available for employees, their spouse, and up to two dependent children with a limit of 500,000 INR, as well as their parents or in-laws for up to 300,000 INR. This comprehensive coverage ensures that essential healthcare needs are met for the entire family unit, providing peace of mind and security in times of medical necessity.
• Group Term & Group Personal Accident Insurance 💼 - Provides insurance coverage against the risk of death / injury during the policy period sustained due to an accident caused by violent, visible & external means.
  • Coverage Type - Employee Only
  • Sum Insured - 3 times of annual CTC with minimum cap of INR 10,00,000
  • Free Cover Limit - 1.5 Crore
• Work-Life Balance ⚖️ - 15 days of Privilege leaves per calendar year, 6 days of Paid Sick leave per calendar year, 6 days of Casual leave per calendar year. Paid 26 weeks of Maternity leaves, 1 week of Paternity leave, a day off on your Birthday, and paid holidays
• Financial Security💰 - Provident Fund & Gratuity
• Wellness 🤸‍ - Employee Assistance Program and comprehensive wellness initiatives
• Growth 🌱 - Access to ongoing learning and development opportunities and career advancement

At Nextiva, we're committed to supporting our employees' health, well-being, and professional growth. Join us and build a rewarding career! 

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