{"id":1037130,"url":"https://alion.io/job/yal-lead-ai-engineer-agentic-systems-voice-ai","title":"Lead AI Engineer – Agentic Systems & Voice AI","company":{"id":20378,"name":"YAL","domain":"yal.inc","url":"https://alion.io/company/yal","size_band":null,"is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Keka","truth_index":null},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"lead","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Hyderabad, India"],"countries":["IN"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":26000,"max_usd":67000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":47},"experience_years_min":8,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Agentic Workflows","optional":false},{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Apache Kafka","optional":false},{"name":"ClickHouse","optional":false},{"name":"gRPC","optional":false},{"name":"KV Cache","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"Multimodal AI","optional":false},{"name":"PostgreSQL","optional":false},{"name":"Quantization","optional":false},{"name":"Speech Recognition","optional":false},{"name":"TensorRT","optional":false},{"name":"Text-to-Speech","optional":false},{"name":"Triton","optional":false},{"name":"Twilio","optional":false},{"name":"vLLM","optional":false},{"name":"Voice Agents","optional":false},{"name":"WebRTC","optional":false},{"name":"WebSockets","optional":false},{"name":"C++","optional":true},{"name":"Docker","optional":true},{"name":"Go","optional":true},{"name":"Grafana","optional":true},{"name":"Hugging Face","optional":true},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":true},{"name":"LangChain","optional":true},{"name":"LlamaIndex","optional":true},{"name":"OpenTelemetry","optional":true},{"name":"Prometheus","optional":true},{"name":"Python","optional":true},{"name":"PyTorch","optional":true},{"name":"Redis","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-18T11:18:54Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-18","last_verified_at":"2026-10-31T16:29:19Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":43,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":43},"description":"Role Overview\nWe are seeking a highly experienced Lead AI Engineer to architect, deploy, and scale intelligent, agentic voice systems capable of handling massive production traffic. This role focuses on building ultra-low-latency, full-duplex conversational voice agents using cascaded architectures (ASR -> LLM -> TTS) tailored for Indian languages. You will act as the technical bridge between complex client workflows and scalable AI capabilities, ensuring robust backend execution, optimal resource efficiency, and seamless human-computer interaction at enterprise scale.\nCore Responsibilities\n Full-Duplex Voice Architecture: Design and orchestrate conversational AI pipelines without relying on native multimodal/full-duplex LLMs. Build and tune highly responsive turn-taking logic, Voice Activity Detection (VAD), and barge-in/interruption handling across cascaded ASR, LLM, and TTS components.\n Telephony & API Integration: Seamlessly bridge AI inference pipelines with standard telephony APIs (Twilio, Plivo, Exotel) for inbound and outbound agent call flows, managing basic call state (transfers, hold, drop detection).\nAgentic Workflow Orchestration: Collaborate directly with clients to deconstruct complex business requirements and operational workflows. Translate these into deterministic agentic capabilities, utilizing state machines, tool-calling, and external API integrations to execute multi-step reasoning tasks.\n Latency & Efficiency Optimization: Drive hardcore performance tuning across the entire stack. Optimize Time-To-First-Token (TTFT), Time-To-First-Audio (TTFA), and Real-Time Factor (RTF) over phone lines. Implement model quantization, KV cache optimization, dynamic batching, and efficient model serving to minimize latency under heavy concurrent loads.\n Indic Language Mastery: Lead the development of multilingual systems that natively handle the phonetic and linguistic nuances of Indian languages. Solve complex challenges related to code-switching (e.g., Hindi-English, Telugu-English), regional accents, and low-resource language modeling.\nBackend & Production Scale: Architect resilient, event-driven backend systems capable of sustaining high-throughput production traffic. Manage stateful asynchronous processes, distributed microservices, and robust data pipelines to ensure zero-downtime deployments and real-time observability.\nRequired Qualifications & Experience\nExperience Baseline: 8+ years of overall software engineering and AI/ML experience, with a strict minimum of 3+ years directly architecting and deploying agentic LLM systems and complex conversational AI in production.\n Production System Expertise: Deep understanding of backend engineering for high-concurrency environments. Proven experience with distributed systems, event-driven architectures (e.g., Apache Kafka), workflow orchestrators (e.g., Temporal), and high-performance databases (e.g., PostgreSQL, ClickHouse).\n Conversational AI Depth: Strong operational knowledge of speech processing models (ASR/TTS) and streaming protocols (WebRTC, gRPC, WebSockets). You must know how to handle endpointing, stream buffering, and state management for natural voice interactions.\n Optimization & Serving: Hands-on experience with high-performance inference servers (e.g., vLLM, NVIDIA Triton, TensorRT) and optimization techniques for large-scale model deployment.\n Client to Code Translation: Demonstrated ability to act as a technical architect who can sit with stakeholders, map out domain-specific workflows (e.g., public grievance handling, CRM automation), and model them into reliable AI agents.\nBonus / Preferred Qualifications\nDeep Telephony Infrastructure: Hands-on experience with bare-metal VoIP networks, custom SIP trunks, and RTP streaming. Familiarity with managing and configuring PBX systems like Asterisk or FreeSWITCH, and handling the network latency and jitter inherent to low-level telecom systems.\nIdeal Technical Stack\n Languages: Python, C++, Go (for high-performance backend components)\nAI/ML: PyTorch, vLLM, HuggingFace, LangChain/LlamaIndex, specialized ASR/TTS frameworks\n Telephony & Audio: WebRTC, standard telecom APIs (Twilio/Exotel), standard audio encoding (8kHz µ-law/A-law)\nBackend & Infrastructure: Kubernetes, Docker, gRPC, Apache Kafka, Temporal, Redis, PostgreSQL\n Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry (focusing on sub-millisecond tracing for audio/text pipelines)","description_format":"text","description_chars":4430,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":8,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[{"language":"English","level":"All levels","optional":false}]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Artificial Intelligence","Conversational AI","Speech & Audio AI","AI Agents"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-18T16:52:12Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":44,"band":"fade","label":"Fading","p_open":1,"p_active":0.802,"p_room":0.55,"age_days":42,"expected_fill_days":42,"reasons":["conf:0","velocity","win:tail"],"computed_at":"2026-10-31T05:58:55Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/yal-lead-ai-engineer-agentic-systems-voice-ai","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/yal-lead-ai-engineer-agentic-systems-voice-ai.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-31T18:40:22Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":29241,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-01T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":20378},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=20378"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fyal-lead-ai-engineer-agentic-systems-voice-ai"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fyal-lead-ai-engineer-agentic-systems-voice-ai"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fyal-lead-ai-engineer-agentic-systems-voice-ai"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/yal-lead-ai-engineer-agentic-systems-voice-ai\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fyal-lead-ai-engineer-agentic-systems-voice-ai"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":1037130}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"yal.inc","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":1037130},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. 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