Principal Software Engineer, Programmable Comms

Aircall is a unicorn, AI-powered customer communications platform used by 22,000+ companies worldwide to drive revenue, resolve issues faster, and scale customer-facing teams. We’re redefining customer communications by bringing voice, SMS, WhatsApp, and AI together into one seamless workspace.

Our momentum comes from a simple idea: help teams work smarter, not harder. Aircall’s AI Voice Agent automates routine calls, AI Assist streamlines post-call work, and AI Assist Pro delivers real-time guidance so people can do their best work. The result is higher revenue, faster resolutions, and teams that scale with confidence.

Aircall is headquartered in Paris, our European HQ, with a strong North American presence anchored in Seattle, our North American HQ, and teams across Madrid, London, Berlin, San Francisco, New York City, Sydney, and Mexico City. We’ve built a product customers love and a business that’s scaling quickly, backed by world-class investors and driven by rapid AI innovation across multiple product lines.

At Aircall, you’ll join a company in motion. We’re ambitious, product-driven, and execution-focused, with visible impact, fast decisions, and real growth.

How we work at Aircall: We’re customer-obsessed, data-driven, and focused on delivering meaningful outcomes. We value ownership, continuous learning, and thoughtful speed. If you thrive in a collaborative, fast-moving environment where trust and impact matter, you’ll feel at home here.

Communications Platform is the part of Aircall that makes a call connect, a message arrive and a number work. Voice, messaging, numbers, carriers, routing and the APIs on top of them. Every product Aircall sells, from the Workspace to our AI voice and messaging agents, runs on it. That platform is changing shape. Aircall is becoming an AI-native company, and the systems we built for humans on web and mobile now have to serve AI agents as first-class users and participants. That means programmable, well-contracted voice and messaging, reliability that holds as agent traffic grows, and cost that works at enterprise volume, not just in a demo.

What We're Looking For

• You have set technical strategy across several teams or domains and can point to architecture that others have successfully built on.

• You have deep experience designing and operating large-scale, high-availability distributed systems.

• Experience in real-time communications — such as VoIP, SIP, WebRTC, media, messaging, or carrier networks — is a strong plus.

• You understand products and customers, not just systems. You anticipate business needs and translate them into clear technical direction.

• You have led reliability at scale, including:

  • SLOs and reliability standards

  • Incident management practices

  • Resilience and disaster recovery

  • Capacity planning

  • Performance and latency

• You use AI to work at a higher level yourself, and you have thought seriously about designing systems with non-deterministic components, including:

  • Failure modes

  • Observability

  • Guardrails

  • Human-in-the-loop approaches

• You influence and persuade through clear writing, strong technical judgment, and sound reasoning, rather than seniority.

• You are comfortable navigating ambiguity, complexity, and disagreement.

• You actively make the engineers and teams around you better.

Required Skills & Experience

• 10+ years of experience building and operating production distributed systems, with significant time spent in technical leadership roles.

• Strong cloud experience, ideally with AWS, together with hands-on experience with Kubernetes and the operational realities of running services at scale.

• A security-first mindset, with practical experience in observability and incident management.

• The ability to credibly review code, architecture, and technical designs across the different stacks and domains you influence.

• Fluent written and spoken English.

What This Role Is Not

• Not a people management role. You will have no direct reports; your influence comes from the quality of your technical judgment, communication, and leadership.

• Not a detached architecture role. You will stay close to the code, technical designs, production systems, and incidents.

How We'll Measure Success in Your First Year

• A clear and agreed technical direction for the platform, visibly reflected in team priorities and quarterly plans.

• At least one significant cross-domain technical challenge moved from an open question through to production.

• A measurable improvement in reliability standards and practices, consistently applied across the platform.

• Other engineering teams are able to build on the platform more easily, with fewer escalations and dependencies required to move forward.

• Engineers around you are visibly developing toward Staff and Principal-level engineering roles.