Sr Staff Software Engineer - AI | Studio

The Team

Five9 has been at the forefront of the cloud transformation in contact centers, enabling organizations to transition from legacy on‑premise systems to modern cloud-based solutions. The cloud contact center space is now a major hub for innovation in real-time communications and a leading area for the application of Artificial Intelligence—especially Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs).

Our Studio Product Engineering team develops a suite of cutting‑edge AI products that leverage industry-leading AI technologies from OpenAI, Google, IBM Watson, and Amazon, integrated seamlessly into Five9’s robust microservices platform.

Our vision is to reimagine the way customers connect with brands. Our AI agents will deliver delightful, highly efficient self‑service experiences at super-human speed, while intelligently incorporating live agents whenever human interaction is required. These AI agents will also support live agents and empower supervisors and managers to optimize their blend of human and AI resources.

This position is based out of one of the offices of our affiliate Acqueon Technologies in India and will follow the hybrid work model of that location.

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Role Purpose

As a Senior Staff Software Engineer, you will be a hands-on technical leader and role model within the team. You will influence architecture, design, and development across multiple products, ensuring alignment with both technology strategy and business goals.

This role requires someone who can take a broad view across teams, make sound trade-offs, build alignment, and drive progress toward shared objectives. You will actively contribute code, review the work of others, and be at the forefront of applying AI to accelerate software development.

You will provide architectural guidance, lead performance optimization initiatives, and improve the reliability and quality of our products and services. A strong background in designing distributed, scalable systems on cloud platforms such as GCP, AWS, or Azure is essential.

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Key Responsibilities

Technical Leadership

• Take deep ownership of all aspects of product software engineering, including feature development, technical debt management, production incident response, and contribution to architecture and technology roadmaps.
• Provide mentorship and strong technical leadership to local engineering teams.
• Serve as the go‑to expert for engineering leaders on complex, high‑impact technical challenges.

Feature and Architecture Ownership

• Own end-to-end design and implementation of features, including scope definition, backlog refinement, and timely delivery.
• Propose architecture enhancements and lead technical discussions across engineering, product, and QA teams.
• Be responsible for the full software lifecycle—development, deployment, and production operations.
• Ensure strong observability and proactively resolve functional and non‑functional issues that impact customer experience.

Hands-on Development

• Write clean, maintainable code to deliver new product features based on product and customer needs.
• Establish and maintain coding standards, shared libraries, and engineering best practices.
• Review code contributions from peers.
• Use AI to speed up development and coach others on effective usage.

Production Incident Resolution

• Lead investigations and deep root cause analyses for production issues.
• Ensure timely, high-quality resolutions that improve system stability and long-term reliability.

Cross-functional Collaboration & Communication

• Work closely with senior leadership—including the Five9 CTO—along with Architecture, Product Management, Customer Support, FDE, and Professional Services teams.
• Communicate clearly and effectively with both technical and non‑technical stakeholders.
• Provide regular updates to senior leadership on system health, team progress, and ongoing initiatives.
• During production incidents, clearly articulate impact and resolution timelines.

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Required Skills

Technical Expertise

• 12+ years of experience designing and developing distributed, scalable systems on cloud platforms (GCP, AWS, or Azure) within a SaaS environment.
• Hands-on expertise with cloud-native backend microservices using Java and Spring Boot.
• Ability to create architecture designs, diagrams, and workflows for implementation.
• Highly proficient in multiple programming languages: Java, Python, JavaScript, and others as required.
• Strong expertise in server-side technologies, databases (SQL and NoSQL), caching, and backend frameworks such as Spring Boot.
• Extensive experience with microservices architecture, distributed systems, and running mission-critical software in production.
• Strong hands-on experience with Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, and containerized deployment processes.
• Solid understanding of web application security principles and best practices.
• Strong experience with version control (Git) and modern CI/CD and deployment practices.
• Experience with cloud architectures that separate compute from storage.

System Operations

• Experience in production incident management and debugging complex technical issues.
• Proficiency with monitoring, logging, and APM tools such as New Relic, Grafana, and Prometheus.
• Strong understanding of cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and containerization.
• Experience with dependency management and planning upgrades.
• Familiarity with vulnerability scanning tools and security remediation workflows.

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Educational Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field (Master’s preferred).

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Desirable

• Experience with PHP & Laravel.
• Experience with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and modern frontend frameworks such as Vue.js or React.
• Experience with Contact Centre, IVR, Virtual Agents, VoIP, or telecom service provider environments.