---
title: 'Senior Software Engineer - Systems at Boson AI'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-systems-boson-ai-santa-clara-94h0qsa26h84'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-11'
---

# Senior Software Engineer - Systems at Boson AI

- **Company:** Boson AI
- **Location:** Santa Clara, CA
- **Compensation:** $180k–$400k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-07-08
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-11
- **Apply:** https://jobs.lever.co/bosonai/fef8e0fe-2795-40af-91fd-c545c15c1426

## Job description

About Boson AI: At Boson AI, we are not just building AI solutions; we are pioneering the future of enterprise AI. Driven by a passion for cutting-edge AI research, particularly in the transformative areas of large language models and agentic systems, our mission is to tackle the most complex real-world problems for businesses and unlock significant value. We are a dynamic and collaborative team of researchers and engineers who thrive on pushing the boundaries of what's possible, dedicated to delivering high-quality, reliable products that seamlessly integrate into the fabric of enterprise workflows and set new industry standards.

About the Role: Build and operate the core platform behind Boson's model APIs and agentic products. You'll own the infrastructure that every Boson agent runs on — API serving, state management, data pipelines, context retrieval, and execution runtime — and make it fast, reliable, and easy for product teams to build on.

## Responsibilities

- Own and evolve the core platform infrastructure: API serving layer, state management, policy enforcement engine, and execution runtime for agentic workflows.
- Design and operate high-throughput, low-latency distributed services that back our model API products — including request routing, load management, rate limiting, and multi-tenant isolation.
- Build and maintain downstream data pipelines (ETL/ELT) for API logs, usage analytics, and billing — ensuring data correctness, freshness, and queryability at scale.
- Develop production-grade internal SDKs and libraries with clean APIs, strong type safety, and clear contracts that product teams can build on confidently.
- Architect context and memory systems for conversational workloads — low-latency retrieval, caching, and integration with vector stores and retrieval pipelines.
- Instrument end-to-end observability: define SLIs/SLOs, build structured logging and tracing, and drive reliability improvements across the platform.
- Collaborate closely with ML and product teams to integrate model serving, voice runtime, and tooling infrastructure under tight latency and quality constraints.

## Qualifications

- 3+ years building and operating backend systems at scale — you've owned services that other teams depend on in production.
- Strong distributed systems fundamentals: concurrency, fault tolerance, consistency tradeoffs, capacity planning.
- Hands-on experience with data pipeline infrastructure (Kafka/Kinesis, Spark/Flink, Airflow, or similar) for log processing, analytics, or ETL workloads.
- Track record of designing APIs and frameworks adopted by other engineering teams — you care about developer experience and long-term maintainability.
- Proficiency in at least one systems language (Go, Rust, Java, C++) or Python in a performance-sensitive context.
- Comfortable working across the stack: cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP), containerized deployments (K8s), CI/CD, and production oncall.

Bonus point

- Experience with LLM serving, agentic orchestration patterns (ReAct, planner-executor), or RAG pipelines.
- Familiarity with emerging agent integration protocols (MCP, A2A) or orchestration frameworks (LangChain, LlamaIndex).
- Background in real-time media systems (audio/video streaming, low-latency signaling).
- Experience building high-stakes platform services (payments, identity, core data) where correctness and auditability are non-negotiable.

## About Boson AI

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Boson AI builds real-time, audio-native AI models and agentic systems for natural, conversational voice interactions with machines.
- **Entity Type**: Private (funding not disclosed)
- **Headquarters**: Santa Clara, California, United States (also Toronto, Canada office)
- **Founded**: 2023
- **Founders**: Dr. Alex Smola (Co-Founder & CEO/CSO), Dr. Mu Li (Co-Founder & CEO/CTO), Yi Zhu (Co-Founder, departed May 2026), Yizhi Liu (Co-Founder)

## Core Business
- **Primary industries**: Conversational AI, Voice AI, Multimodal AI, Enterprise AI infrastructure
- **Target customers**: B2B – enterprises deploying voice agents, real-time customer service, and AI-powered communication workflows
- **Mission**: “Make communication with machines as easy, natural and fun as talking to a human.”

## Products & Services
- **Higgs Realtime**: An end-to-end, audio-native real-time speech-to-speech model for enterprise voice agents. Supports interruptions, code-switching (100+ languages), ~700ms speech-in to speech-out latency, and API compatibility with OpenAI Realtime (change three lines of code). Pricing: $0.0023/min audio in, $0.014/min audio out. [LinkedIn post](https://linkedin.com/company/boson-ai)
- **Higgs Avatar v1**: Real-time conversational avatar foundation model that generates 480p video at 16 FPS from a single image and streaming audio. Designed for real-time digital presence in voice agents. Private preview announced May 2026. [LinkedIn post](https://linkedin.com/company/boson-ai)
- **Agent Platform (Agent OS)**: An internal platform for building, deploying, and orchestrating AI agents (referenced in job postings as “Member of Technical Staff - Agent Platform”).

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not publicly available
- **Key Metric**: Total funding not disclosed; headcount of 32 employees (as of mid-2026)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Not publicly listed. Talent sources include Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, University of Toronto, Vector Institute, indicating strong ties to top AI research and engineering communities.
- **Growth Signals**: Launch of Higgs Realtime (August 2026) and Higgs Avatar v1 (May 2026); active hiring for senior engineering and ML roles; 10,000+ LinkedIn followers with +2.5% monthly growth; technical team comprises 68% of workforce.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Full-stack AI ownership**: Builds own foundation models (audio, avatar, agent orchestration) rather than stitching external components, enabling deep co-design for low latency and natural interaction.
- **Real-time expertise**: Achieves ~700ms speech-in to speech-out and ~125ms barge-in yield, with top benchmarks in tool-calling and interruption recovery.
- **Cost efficiency**: Higgs Realtime pricing ($0.0023/min audio in) is significantly lower than many competitors, targeting enterprise-scale deployment.
- **Research pedigree**: Founders have “almost a century of expertise in AI” (Alex Smola and Mu Li are well-known ML researchers; Smola co-authored seminal work on kernel methods and scalable ML).

## Strategic Focus
- **Real-time conversational AI for enterprise**: Prioritizing production-ready voice agents that can handle interruptions, code-switching, and emotional alignment.
- **Multimodal expansion**: Adding visual presence (avatars) to voice agents to make interactions more natural and human-compatible.
- **Enterprise deployment**: Offering self-hosting options and private previews for large-scale customers.
- **Building the full agentic pipeline**: From data and modeling to training, tuning, and serving – all in-house.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Described as “a diverse group of researchers, engineers, and industry specialists united by a passion for innovation.” Emphasis on building scalable AI that serves millions.
- **Work policy**: Most roles are on-site at Santa Clara HQ or Toronto office. A Site Reliability Engineer role was listed as remote (Toronto). Likely hybrid/on-site for core engineering.
- **Engineering environment**: Deep technical stack (PyTorch, TensorFlow, Kubernetes, NVIDIA, Supermicro, etc.). Opportunity to work on frontier AI models and real-time systems.
- **Growth stage**: Small team (~32 people) with strong research roots; employees have previously worked at AWS, Google, Robinhood, and alumni go to OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI – indicating high-caliber talent and career mobility.
- **Hiring process**: Uses AI tools to assist with resume review and analysis, but final decisions made by humans.

## Sources
1. [boson.ai/about](https://www.boson.ai/about)
2. [boson.ai/about/team](https://www.boson.ai/about/team)
3. [linkedin.com/company/boson-ai](https://linkedin.com/company/boson-ai)
4. [jobs.lever.co/bosonai](https://jobs.lever.co/bosonai)

## Other roles at Boson AI

- [Datacenter Technician](https://feeny.ai/job/datacenter-technician-boson-ai-barrie-11tetdz9z3vr) — Barrie, Canada
- [Software Engineer - Platform & Application](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-platform-application-boson-ai-santa-clara-zct1esjbfzcn) — Santa Clara, CA
- [Site Reliability Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/site-reliability-engineer-boson-ai-toronto-69xyfzggnjaj) — Toronto, Canada
- [Frontend Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/frontend-engineer-boson-ai-santa-clara-nbsv99agxh8b) — Santa Clara, CA
- [Machine Learning Engineer - Enterprise](https://feeny.ai/job/machine-learning-engineer-enterprise-boson-ai-toronto-cm87w800xvcq) — Toronto, Canada
- [Member of Technical Staff - Agent Platform (Agent OS)](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-agent-platform-agent-os-boson-ai-santa-clara-95vzvadf5n6c) — Santa Clara, CA
- [Senior Software Engineer - Systems](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-systems-procreate-hobart-r1d7yb6re03h) — Hobart