Senior Voice Designer

Job description

Redefine the future of customer experiences. One conversation at a time.

We’re changing the game with a first-of-its-kind, conversation-centric platform that unifies team collaboration and customer experience in one place. Powered by AI, built by amazing humans.

Our culture is forward-thinking, customer-obsessed and built on an unwavering belief that connection fuels business and life; connections to our customers with our signature Amazing Service®, our products and services, and most importantly, each other. Since 2008, 100,000+ companies and 1M+ users rely on Nextiva for customer and team communication.

If you’re ready to collaborate and create with amazing people, let your personality shine and be on the frontlines of helping businesses deliver amazing experiences, you’re in the right place.

Build Amazing - Deliver Amazing - Live Amazing - Be Amazing

We are looking for an expert at the intersection of linguistics and voice interaction design to help design and implement advanced AI voice agents on our platform. As a Senior Voice AI Designer, you will define the voice and conversational experience of our AI assistant from the ground up. You will craft natural dialogues, optimize language understanding, and work cross-functionally with engineers to bring human-like voice interactions to life. This role is highly impactful – your work will directly influence how thousands of businesses and users communicate using Nextiva’s AI.

Key Responsibilities

• Conversational Design: 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.
• Linguistic Optimization: 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.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: 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.
• User Testing & Iteration: 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.
• Voice UX Best Practices: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.
• Innovation: 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.

Qualifications

• Experience: 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.
• Domain Expertise: 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.
• Technical Skills: 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.
• Linguistic Skills: 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.
• Communication & Collaboration: 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.
• User-Centric Mindset: 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.

Preferred Qualifications (Nice to Have)

• 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).

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 Nexties 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.

The expected hiring range is $104,000 - $162,000. A different level in the job hierarchy may apply to a specific candidate, resulting in a different hiring range.

• Health 🍏 - Multiple health plan options to suit your needs, including medical, dental, vision, and telemedicine coverage
• Insurance 💼 - Life, disability, and supplemental indemnity plans
• Work-Life Balance ⚖️ - Flexible Time Off (FTO) for salaried employees, PTO for hourly employees, Paid Sick Time (PST), paid parental bonding leave, and paid holidays
• Financial Security 💰 - 401(k) with company match, Health Savings Accounts with company contributions, Dependent Care FSA
• 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!

Established in 2008 and headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona, Nextiva secured $200M from Goldman Sachs in late 2021, valuing the company at $2.7B.To check out what’s going on at Nextiva, check us out on Instagram, Instagram (MX), YouTube, LinkedIn, and the Nextiva blog.

Nextiva is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. We prohibit discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws. Nextiva participates in the E-Verify Program where and as required by law. For additional information about E-Verify visit USCIS.

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