Engineering Head - Conversational AI
First seen by Alion on Sep 24, 2026.
Engineering Head
Confidential Senior Engineering Leadership Opportunity
About the Role :
We are looking for an experienced Engineering Head to lead the architecture, engineering organization and technology strategy for a fast-growing enterprise AI platform. The role is based in Gurgaon and reports directly to the Co-founder & CEO.
The successful candidate will be responsible for building and scaling production-grade conversational AI systems, strengthening engineering processes, leading a high-calibre engineering organization and translating product requirements into reliable, scalable and commercially viable technology.
Key Responsibilities :
- Own the overall engineering architecture, technology roadmap, engineering quality, reliability, performance and security.
- Lead and scale the engineering organization, including hiring, mentoring, retaining and developing strong technical leaders.
- Design and build production-grade conversational AI and voice systems capable of handling real-world enterprise workloads.
- Own AI/ML and LLM architecture, model strategy, model combinations, evaluation and inference optimization.
- Drive real-time voice architecture across the complete ASR - LLM - TTS pipeline.
- Build highly scalable distributed systems supporting high concurrency and global production workloads.
- Own observability, platform reliability, technical debt, security and performance engineering.
- Work closely with the CEO, Product, Sales and other business stakeholders to translate commercial requirements into technology outcomes.
- Take products and platforms from zero-to-one through production and significant commercial scale.
- Drive infrastructure and inference economics, including optimization of cost per minute and overall platform efficiency.
Technical Requirements :
- 12+ years of engineering experience, with substantial hands-on technical depth.
- Proven experience personally building and shipping production Voice AI / Conversational AI systems.
- Strong understanding of latency across streaming ASR, LLM inference and TTS.
- Experience with streaming speech systems, VAD, endpointing, barge-in, DTMF and real-time transcription.
- Working knowledge of SIP/WebRTC, telephony integrations, call routing/transfer, carrier failure handling, recording and consent.
- Strong expertise in backend engineering, distributed systems, cloud infrastructure and real-time streaming.
- Experience with LLM fine-tuning/SFT, preference optimization, distillation, data curation and evaluation.
- Experience designing systems for thousands of concurrent calls or comparable high-concurrency workloads.
- Strong understanding of model fallback, routing and inference-cost optimization.
Leadership Profile :
- Builder of builders with a strong product and business mindset.
- Track record of building or scaling engineering teams from early stage to significant size.
- Hands-on and technically credible with the ability to go deep into architecture and production issues.
- Strong ownership mentality and ability to operate in a fast-moving, founder-led environment.
- Experience collaborating across Product, Business, Sales, Security, Privacy and Compliance.
- Ability to balance engineering excellence, speed, reliability and commercial outcomes.
- Strong communication skills and ability to influence senior stakeholders.
What Success Looks Like :
- Reliable, scalable and observable production AI/voice infrastructure.
- A high-performing engineering organization with strong technical leadership.
- Improved latency, reliability and cost economics across the voice stack.
- Successful delivery of new AI capabilities from concept to production.
- Technology architecture capable of supporting rapid customer and traffic growth.
- Clear alignment between engineering priorities, product roadmap and business outcomes.
Ideal Candidate Background :
Candidates from Voice AI, Conversational AI, Enterprise SaaS, CPaaS, Telecom, Contact Center, Speech Technology or related AI/ML environments are particularly relevant. Experience with large-scale distributed systems and real-time communication platforms is highly valued.
Location & Reporting :
Location : Gurgaon, India
Reporting to : Co-founder & CEO
Level : Engineering Head / Senior Engineering Leadership
Confidentiality :
This document is intended for confidential discussion with prospective candidates and should not be circulated externally without authorization
Skills
Conversational AI, LLM, Distributed Systems, Speech Recognition, IT Head, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Engineering Management