Opportunities from Sierra (ashby)

Full Job Description

About us

Sierra is the leading platform for customer-facing AI agents, working with many of the world's biggest brands — including The GAP, Rocket Mortgage, SoFi, Sutter Health, and SoftBank — to transform how they serve customers and grow their businesses. We are primarily an in-person company based in San Francisco, with growing offices across North America, Europe, and Asia.

We are guided by a set of values that are at the core of our actions and define our culture: Trust, Customer Obsession, Craftsmanship, Intensity, and a commitment to balancing Family along the way. These values are the foundation of our work, and we are committed to upholding them in everything we do.

Our co-founders are Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor. Bret currently serves as Board Chair of OpenAI. Previously, he was co-CEO of Salesforce (which had acquired the company he founded, Quip) and CTO of Facebook. Bret was also one of Google's earliest product managers and co-creator of Google Maps. Before founding Sierra, Clay spent 18 years at Google, where he most recently led Google Labs. Earlier, he started and led Google’s AR/VR effort, Project Starline, and Google Lens. Before that, Clay led the product and design teams for Google Workspace.

What you’ll do

You’ll help shape and scale high-quality voice experiences across a global portfolio of AI agents. Working closely with cross-functional teams and customer stakeholders, you’ll combine systems thinking, design judgment, and operational rigor to improve voice quality, accelerate multilingual readiness, and create more human experiences.

• Improve breadth and depth of voice quality: Evaluate, compare, and iterate on voices across multiple providers, languages, and use cases, ensuring experiences meet a high bar for clarity, naturalness, and appropriateness while continuously improving product and systems.

• Support faster multilingual readiness and launches: Partner with product, engineering, and deployment teams to research solutions, evaluate options, identify risks, and guide voice-related decisions that enable timely, high-confidence launches across regions.

• Design and apply effective and repeatable evaluations: Create and maintain structured methods for assessing voice performance and interaction quality, helping teams make informed tradeoffs and catch issues early.

• Partner cross-functionally to resolve voice and interaction issues: Collaborate with engineering, product, and support teams to investigate quality gaps, diagnose root causes, and drive improvements through clear recommendations and follow-through.

• Participate in customer-facing voice design work: Contribute to voice selection and design discussions with customers, helping them understand options, tradeoffs, and best practices while ensuring outcomes align with their goals.

• Enable teams to scale voice design effectively: Design and develop guidance, examples, lightweight frameworks, and product enhancements, that empower product managers and engineers to make strong voice and interaction decisions independently.

• Co-create agent personas and interaction patterns: Work with internal teams and customers to shape agent personalities, behaviors, and interactions, supporting distinct and intentional agent experiences as a trusted advisor.

• Capture and share learnings: Document insights, patterns, and regional considerations to improve consistency, reduce repeated effort, and raise the overall quality bar across teams and deployments.

What you’ll bring

• 5+ years in a role that blends product craft with applied systems thinking (e.g., voice/AI experience design, conversation design, applied linguistics, UX for AI, product engineering with strong user experience focus, localization program leadership with quality ownership).

• Strong ability to operate across many languages and priorities—you bring structure to ambiguity and can ship reliably while quality stays high.

• Experience creating repeatable evaluation frameworks (rubrics, test suites, scorecards, QA gates) and using them to drive decisions.

• Excellent communication: you can turn messy signals into clear guidance for engineering, product, and customer stakeholders.

• Comfort living close to the work: deep knowledge of the product, understanding our customers and our customers’ customers, always listening, digging into edge cases, constantly improving the system as well as the product.

Even better…

• Experience with speech synthesis and conversational agents.

• Expertise with global language families.

• Familiarity with provider and voice evaluation.

• Linguistics, sound editing, and/or musical background.

• Experience enabling other teams via playbooks, training, and internal tooling.

Our values

• Trust: We build trust with our customers with our accountability, empathy, quality, and responsiveness. We build trust in AI by making it more accessible, safe, and useful. We build trust with each other by showing up for each other professionally and personally, creating an environment that enables all of us to do our best work.

• Customer Obsession: We deeply understand our customers’ business goals and relentlessly focus on driving outcomes, not just technical milestones. Everyone at the company knows and spends time with our customers. When our customer is having an issue, we drop everything and fix it.

• Craftsmanship: We get the details right, from the words on the page to the system architecture. We have good taste. When we notice something isn’t right, we take the time to fix it. We are proud of the products we produce. We continuously self-reflect to continuously self-improve.

• Intensity: We know we don’t have the luxury of patience. We play to win. We care about our product being the best, and when it isn’t, we fix it. When we fail, we talk about it openly and without blame so we succeed the next time.

• Family: We know that balance and intensity are compatible, and we model it in our actions and processes. We are the best technology company for parents. We support and respect each other and celebrate each other’s personal and professional achievements.

What we offer

We want our benefits to reflect our values and offer the following to full-time employees:

• Flexible (unlimited) paid time off

• Medical, dental, and vision benefits for you and your family

• Life insurance and disability benefits

• Retirement plan dependent on country of employment

• Parental leave

• Fertility and family building benefits through Carrot

• Lunch, as well as delicious snacks and coffee to keep you energized

• Discretionary benefit stipend giving people the ability to spend where it matters most

• Free alphorn lessons

These benefits are further detailed in Sierra's policies, may vary by region, and are subject to change at any time, consistent with the terms of any applicable compensation or benefits plans. Eligible full-time employees can participate in Sierra's equity plans subject to the terms of the applicable plans and policies.

Be you, with us

We're working to bring the transformative power of AI to every organization in the world. To do so, it is important to us that the diversity of our employees represents the diversity of our customers. We believe that our work and culture are better when we encourage, support, and respect different skills and experiences represented within our team. We encourage you to apply even if your experience doesn't precisely match the job description. We strive to evaluate all applicants consistently without regard to race, color, religion, gender, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, pregnancy, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, citizenship, or any other legally protected class.