Lead AI Engineer

 

About the Role

We're looking for a Tech Lead to own the technical direction of proAgent's core architecture. You'll lead a small, high-agency team building AI Agents that handle nuanced financial conversations-where every millisecond of latency and every reasoning decision matters.

This is a player-coach role. You'll write code, make architectural decisions, and set the technical bar for how we build intelligent, low-latency voice agents.

What You'll Own

Agent Loop & Reasoning

• Design the agentic runtime that powers natural, multi-turn conversations while executing complex business logic (payment negotiations, compliance guardrails, objection handling)
• Build primitives that balance conversational fluidity with structured reasoning-the agent needs to feel human while making verifiable decisions
• Create context management systems that track consumer state, conversation history, and business rules across long, branching dialogues

Voice AI Systems

• Architect our real-time voice pipeline for sub-1s latency across transcription, reasoning, and synthesis
• Own VAD tuning, and turn-taking logic that makes conversations feel natural
• Evaluate and integrate speech models (STT, TTS, speech-to-speech) as the landscape evolves-we currently work with ElevenLabs and Cartesia for Text to Speech, and Deepgram for Speech to Text, and are always exploring what's next
• Debug and optimize streaming audio and WebRTC

LLM Infrastructure

• Design our prompting, orchestration, and model routing strategies
• Build evaluation frameworks that measure agent quality beyond accuracy-conversation quality, empathy, compliance adherence
• Stay current on model capabilities and make pragmatic build-vs-integrate decisions

Technical Leadership

• Set architectural direction for proAgent platform and surrounding applications
• Mentor engineers and establish engineering practices that scale
• Partner with Product and Client teams to translate customer problems into technical roadmaps
• Make tradeoffs between shipping fast and building durable systems-we need both

What You Bring

• 4+ years building production systems, with 1+ years in a Lead for a project
• Hands-on work with LLMs in production: prompt engineering, orchestration, evaluation
• High bias for action to see things to production - real-time systems can get gnarly, and truly high bias is needed to take things to production
• Strong fundamentals in Python and TypeScript
• Clear technical communication-you can explain complex tradeoffs to engineers and stakeholders alike

Even Better

• Experience with voice AI: speech recognition, synthesis, telephony systems
• Background in fintech, lending, or collections
• Experience with Twilio, LiveKit, ElevenLabs, or similar real-time infrastructure
• You've built agentic systems that combine LLM reasoning with structured actions
• Track record of building and scaling small teams

Why This Role

• High leverage: proAgent is poised to handle millions of live consumer conversations every day. Your architectural decisions directly impact business outcomes.
• Frontier work: Voice AI that reasons, decides, and acts is one of the hardest problems in applied AI. We're building it.
• Ownership: Small team, big scope. You'll shape what proAgent becomes.