Senior Voice Designer

Summary

Join Nextiva as a Senior Voice AI Designer and redefine the future of customer experiences. You will design and implement advanced AI voice agents, crafting natural dialogues and optimizing language understanding. Collaborate with engineers to bring human-like voice interactions to life, directly influencing how thousands of businesses communicate. Conduct usability tests, analyze user interactions, and refine the dialogue flow to improve user satisfaction. Establish conversation design best practices and stay updated on the latest trends in conversational AI. This impactful role requires expertise in linguistics and voice interaction design.

Requirements

• 4+ years of hands-on experience designing voice or conversational interfaces (voice assistants, IVR systems, chatbots, etc.)
• You have led conversation design for at least one significant product or feature from concept to launch
• Strong background in Voice UX/Conversation Design and/or Computational Linguistics/NLP
• Deep understanding of how people naturally communicate and how to design AI interactions to match that
• Familiarity with speech and language technologies – experience working with ASR, NLU, and TTS systems is required
• Proficiency in using conversational AI platforms or tools (e.g., Dialogflow, Amazon Lex, Microsoft Bot Framework, or similar) to build or prototype dialogue flows
• Basic programming or scripting skills (Python or similar) to manipulate conversational data or tweak prototypes
• Solid grasp of linguistic concepts (grammar, semantics, pragmatics, phonetics) and ability to apply them to improve language understanding in AI
• You can craft dialog that accounts for diverse ways users might phrase things, without needing each variation explicitly spelled out
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to document designs clearly and explain reasoning to diverse stakeholders (engineering, product, customer support, etc.)
• Proven ability to work in cross-functional teams and iterate based on feedback and user data
• Empathy for end-users and a strong desire to create delightful, frictionless voice experiences
• A mindset of continuous improvement – you iterate until the conversation feels as smooth as talking to a helpful colleague

Responsibilities

• Create intuitive voice conversation flows and dialogue scripts for our AI assistant
• Define user intents, sample utterances, prompts, and error recovery paths that enable users to achieve their goals naturally and efficiently
• Apply your linguistics expertise to tune the AI’s language understanding and responses
• Expand the system’s ability to manage diverse phrasing, accents, and conversational nuances (including context carryover and user interruptions) without needing explicit definitions
• Work closely with product managers and AI engineers to implement your conversation designs
• Fine-tune the speech recognition (ASR), natural language understanding (NLU), and text-to-speech (TTS) components of the voice agent by providing requirements and iterative feedback
• Ensure the technical implementation aligns with the intended user experience
• Conduct usability tests of the voice agent (e.g., prototype dialogues or beta features) and analyze real user interactions
• Identify pain points or misunderstandings and refine the dialogue flow, wording, or underlying NLU models to continuously improve success rates and user satisfaction
• Establish conversation design best practices and standards
• Implement effective turn-taking cues, confirmations, and personality-consistent responses for the assistant
• Champion a user-centric voice that is friendly, professional, and reflective of Nextiva’s brand, without over-explaining technical details to users
• Stay up to date with the latest trends in conversational AI and voice UX
• Experiment with new tools or approaches (e.g., leveraging large language models for dialogue, improving multi-modal voice + screen interactions, etc.) and incorporate relevant innovations to keep our AI voice agents on the forefront

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with advanced conversational AI techniques, such as leveraging large language models or retrieval-based methods to enhance dialogue management
• Background in telephony or contact center voice applications (e.g., designing IVR call flows or voice bots for customer support)
• Understanding of call center metrics and workflows is a plus
• Multilingual conversation design experience – e.g., designing voice interactions in multiple languages or accommodating various accents/cultures
• Active involvement in the conversational AI or linguistics community (publishing articles, speaking at industry events, participating in groups like Voice UX meetups or the Conversation Design Institute)

Benefits

• Multiple health plan options to suit your needs, including medical, dental, vision, and telemedicine coverage
• Life, disability, and supplemental indemnity plans
• Flexible Time Off (FTO) for salaried employees, PTO for hourly employees, Paid Sick Time (PST), paid parental bonding leave, and paid holidays
• 401(k) with company match, Health Savings Accounts with company contributions, Dependent Care FSA
• Employee Assistance Program and comprehensive wellness initiatives
• Access to ongoing learning and development opportunities and career advancement