Position:Principal Member of Technical Staff — Slack Voice Agent Location:Remote - Washington (PST time zone accommodation required) Duration:6 Months (Potential for extension or conversion to FTE) Job ID: 179253 ## About the role You will own the architecture and design of the platform behind Slack's voice agent — a native mobile voice/AI assistant experience inside the Slack mobile ecosystem. This is production work, not prototyping: your services, APIs, and pipelines must meet the bar of Slack's production codebase — modular, tested, linted, accessible, and performant at Slack's scale (tens of millions of users). Slack is an extremely design-driven organization. Every hire, engineering included, must have demonstrable design sensibility and experience working within (or adjacent to) a mature design system. As the principal engineer on the project, you set the technical standard that our iOS and Android client engineers build against. ## What you'll do • Own end-to-end architecture and technical design for the voice agent platform: service decomposition, API contracts, data models, failure modes, and latency/capacity budgets for real-time conversational experiences. • Design, build, and operate the RESTful web services that power the voice agent — voice capture/playback backends, streaming agent responses, session state, and deep integration with Slack's mobile apps — and integrate with (and help modernize) existing SOAP-based enterprise web services in the CIO organization. • Architect real-time communication layers (WebSockets / streaming APIs) for low-latency voice and agent responses: connection management, backpressure, reconnection, and graceful degradation. • Define the client–service contracts that iOS and Android engineers implement against; review client integration code for architectural soundness. • Own CI/CD and build infrastructure: Jenkins pipelines (declarative pipelines, shared libraries), Maven builds and artifact management, quality gates, feature flags, and staged rollouts. • Lead design reviews and code reviews to Slack's standards; author architecture decision records; mentor senior engineers on the team. • Collaborate daily with design and product — ensuring voice interaction states (listening / thinking / speaking / error / interruption) are technically realized to spec, not approximately. ## Must-have • 10+ years of software engineering experience, operating at principal/architect level on large-scale distributed systems — a demonstrated track record of architecture and design ownership, not just implementation. • Expert-level REST API design (versioning, pagination, error models, idempotency, authN/authZ) *and* working fluency with SOAP/WSDL enterprise web services, including migrating or wrapping SOAP services behind modern REST interfaces. • Production experience with real-time systems: WebSockets, streaming APIs, low-latency backends; voice/audio streaming experience is a strong plus. • Deep JVM services background (Java and/or Kotlin) with expert-level *Maven* (multi-module builds, dependency management, plugin configuration) and *Jenkins* (pipeline-as-code, shared libraries, scaling build infrastructure). • Experience building and operating services consumed by mobile clients — you understand what iOS/Android teams need from an API contract. • Shipped and maintained systems at 100K+ MAU minimum; 1M+ MAU strongly preferred — with the observability, incident discipline, and phased-release experience that scale demands. • Rigorous testing culture: unit, integration, and contract testing embedded in CI; Git-based code review culture. • Design sensibility: experience working within or adjacent to a mature design system at a design-driven company. ## Nice-to-have • Prior work at a company with a strong, recognized design language — e.g., Apple, Airbnb, Duolingo, Linear, Figma, Notion, Stripe, Cash App/Block, Headspace, Robinhood, Vercel. • Voice/conversational AI product experience (e.g., OpenAI, , Replika, Siri/Alexa teams): ASR/TTS integration, LLM streaming backends, token-streaming architectures, WebRTC. • Hands-on familiarity with Swift/iOS or Kotlin/Android — enough to review client-side integration with empathy and precision. • Experience in enterprise/CIO-organization environments: security, compliance, and governance requirements for internal-facing platforms. • Accessibility at production depth (voice experiences must be accessible by default). • Aside from the job description, what will a typical day for this contractor look like? Interfacing with Slack and AI Research team to integrate voice agent into Slack • Please rank your top preferred skill sets (e.g.: tools, previous experience, technologies) : No particular ordering. Swift / SwiftUI / UIKit / Kotlin / Jetpack / SQLDelight / JUnit About PTR Global: PTR Global is a leading provider of information technology and workforce solutions. PTR Global has become one of the largest providers in its industry, with over 5000 professionals providing services across the U.S. and Canada. For more information visit www.ptrglobal.com At PTR Global, we understand the importance of your privacy and security. We NEVER ASK job applicants to: • Pay any fee to be considered for, submitted to, or selected for any opportunity. • Purchase any product, service, or gift cards from us or for us as part of an application, interview, or selection process. • Provide sensitive financial information such as credit card numbers or banking information. Successfully placed or hired candidates would only be asked for banking details after accepting an offer from us during our official onboarding processes as part of payroll setup. Pay Range: $90/hr - $95/hr The specific compensation for this position will be determined by several factors, including the scope, complexity, and location of the role, as well as the cost of labor in the market; the skills, education, training, credentials, and experience of the candidate; and other conditions of employment. Our full-time consultants have access to benefits, including medical, dental, vision, and 401K contributions, as well as PTO, sick leave, and other benefits mandated by applicable state or localities where you reside or work. If you receive a suspicious message, email, or phone call claiming to be from PTR Global do not respond or click on any links. Instead, contact us directly at +1 214-740-2424. 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