Software Development Architect (Voice)

Who We Are:

At Bandwidth, your music matters when you are part of the BAND.  We celebrate differences and encourage BANDmates to be their authentic selves.  #jointheband

What We Are Looking For:

We are seeking a hands-on Voice Software Architect to serve as the technical authority for Bandwidth’s Voice platform, spanning domains such as Routing, Programmable Voice, Emergency Services, Trust Services, and AI Enablement.

This is a high-impact, strategic, and deeply hands-on role responsible for defining and driving the architectural vision across the Voice organization. You will ensure our systems are resilient, scalable, and operable at five-nines reliability, while enabling teams to move quickly and deliver customer value.

This role is hands-on by design. You will be actively contributing alongside engineers—writing production code, working tickets, prototyping solutions, and debugging complex issues. This is not a supervisory role; it is an advisory and implementation role, where you lead through technical contribution and influence.

Great architecture at Bandwidth is grounded in reality—you won’t just define systems, you will build, validate, and evolve them in production. You are expected to stay close to the code and ensure architectural decisions hold up under real-world conditions.

You will partner closely with Business Operations, Network Engineering, Product, and Executive leadership to translate business priorities into clear technical direction, standards, and execution plans, while remaining embedded in the day-to-day engineering work

What You'll Do:

• Lead by Code & Implementation: Stay deeply connected to implementation by actively contributing to the codebase. This includes writing production code, working on complex tickets, prototyping critical components, reviewing designs and code paths, and guiding teams through difficult technical challenges. Ensure architectural decisions are validated through real systems and result in solutions that are practical, scalable, and maintainable in production.
• Define Voice Architecture Strategy: Drive the strategic and tactical architectural vision for the Voice platform across multiple domains, including Routing, SIP, Programmable Voice, and Emergency Services. Ground this strategy in hands-on implementation by validating designs through prototypes and direct contributions to critical systems. Ensure systems evolve to support global scale, regulatory requirements, and five-nines availability, while translating business priorities into durable, buildable solutions.
• Drive Cross-Team Technical Leadership: Act as the architectural glue across teams by working directly with engineers in the code and design process. Guide cross-system decisions through hands-on involvement in implementation, ensuring local optimizations do not compromise overall system performance or reliability. Partner with Development Managers and Tech Leads to align execution with architectural direction through active technical contribution.
• Design Highly Reliable Distributed Systems: Design and implement fault-tolerant, observable, and resilient distributed systems. Define and apply patterns for traffic routing, failover, backpressure, rate limiting, idempotency, and graceful degradation through real-world implementation. Ensure systems are built to handle production realities by staying directly involved in critical paths and operational behavior.
• Establish Standards & Governance: Define and enforce engineering standards through direct involvement in code, design reviews, and implementation. Establish best practices for API design, service boundaries, observability, reliability, and security, and ensure adoption by actively working alongside teams. Drive consistency through example, not just documentation.
• Guide Technical Tradeoffs: Lead technical decision-making by engaging directly in system design and implementation. Evaluate tradeoffs such as build vs. buy, short-term delivery vs. long-term sustainability, and technical debt prioritization through hands-on involvement in the code and systems. Ensure decisions are practical, well-informed, and aligned with business goals.
• Partner with Product & Leadership: Collaborate with Product and leadership to shape solutions that are both feasible and scalable, grounded in hands-on understanding of the systems. Communicate technical risks and constraints clearly, informed by direct experience in implementation. Influence roadmap decisions through a combination of architectural insight and active technical contribution.

What Sets This Role Apart:

• Hands-On by Design: You are not just designing systems—you are actively building them. You write production code, work alongside engineers, and validate architecture through real implementation.
• Platform-Level Impact: You shape how the Voice platform evolves across multiple domains, not just within a single team.
• Empowered Technical Leadership: You lead through technical contribution and collaboration, with the autonomy to shape architectural direction while partnering closely with teams to drive alignment and outcomes.
• Built for Production Reality: You ensure systems are not just scalable, but operable, reliable, and supportable under real-world conditions.
• Pragmatic Engineering: You balance technical excellence with delivery, making smart tradeoffs to move the business forward.

 What You Need:

• Hands-on Engineering: The ability to actively contribute to the codebase, including debugging complex issues, working production tickets, and prototyping solutions to validate architectural patterns.
• Architectural Experience: A proven track record in Staff, Principal, or Architect-level roles, driving system design across multiple teams and domains.
• Distributed Systems Expertise: Deep experience designing and operating high-scale, distributed systems, including high-throughput, low-latency, and event-driven architectures.
• Cloud & Infrastructure: Strong understanding of cloud platforms (AWS or similar), including building resilient, observable systems that operate reliably in production environments.
• Service Architecture: Experience designing service-oriented systems and APIs (REST, gRPC), with a focus on scalability, maintainability, and clear service boundaries.
• Reliability & Scale: Proven ability to design systems that handle real-world production load, with strong consideration for fault tolerance, performance, and system resilience.
• Networking & Data Fundamentals: Solid understanding of networking concepts (IP, protocols) and data systems (relational and non-relational), with the ability to apply them in distributed environments.

Bonus Points:

• Platform Migrations: Experience leading the technical side of large-scale platform migrations or system transformations.
• Event-Driven Architecture: Expertise in event-driven systems and asynchronous messaging patterns (e.g., Kafka) to decouple and scale complex workflows.
• High Availability Systems: Experience operating systems with strict uptime requirements (e.g., 99.99%+), including global systems and regional failover strategies.
• Infrastructure & Platform Engineering: Experience with infrastructure-as-code (IaC), platform standardization, and governance at an organizational scale.

Voice / Telecom Expertise (Strongly Preferred)

You don’t need a 20-year telecom background, but this platform operates on real-time communication systems, and experience in this space will accelerate your impact.

• Real-Time Communications: Experience with SIP, VoIP, WebRTC, or similar systems, including signaling flows, session management, and routing
• Media Plane Fundamentals: Understanding of codec negotiation, RTP/RTCP, SRTP, NAT traversal, and DTMF, including what happens after a call is established
• Telecom Systems Knowledge: Familiarity with carrier integrations, call routing, and telecom reliability or regulatory constraints
• Latency-Sensitive Systems: Experience building or operating systems where latency, jitter, and packet loss directly impact user experience

The Whole Person Promise:

At Bandwidth, we’re pretty proud of our corporate culture, which is rooted in our “Whole Person Promise.” We promise all employees that they can have meaningful work AND a full life, and we provide a work environment geared toward enriching your body, mind, and spirit. How do we do that? Well…

• 100% company-paid Medical, Vision, & Dental coverage for you and your family with low deductibles and low out-of-pocket expenses.
• All new hires receive four weeks of PTO.
• PTO Embargo. When you take time off (of any kind!) you’re embargoed from working. Bandmates and managers are not allowed to interrupt your PTO – not even with email.
• Additional PTO can be earned throughout the year through volunteer hours and Bandwidth challenges.
• “Mahalo moments” program grants additional time off for life’s most important moments like graduations, buying a first home, getting married, wedding anniversaries (every five years), and the birth of a grandchild.
• 90-Minute Workout Lunches and unlimited meetings with our very own nutritionist.