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Lead AI Engineer (Speech / Voice)

Chrona agency
locationNew York, NY, USA
PublishedPublished: 6/14/2022
Engineering
Full Time

Job Description

Job Description

We are a YC-backed AI startup building the worlds most advanced real-time Speech AI coach used in online calls. Over the past six months, weve grown from $100k to $5M ARR, raised $2.5M from top-tier investors, and assembled a world-class engineering team (ex-Google, Nvidia, Lyft, Amazon) solving hard problems in voice, ML, and real-time infrastructure.

We are looking for a senior, hands-on engineer to lead development of our real-time Voice AI Agent and internal ML toolkit. Youll own end-to-end systems across real-time audio, applied ML, and production deployment working directly with our CEO and CTO.

What Youll Do

  • Build and scale our Real-Time Voice AI Agent (LiveKit/WebRTC):
    streaming ASR/TTS, VAD, diarization, state machines, session management, latency/QoS tuning.

  • Develop our ML toolkit and ship models to prod (ASR, TTS, VAD, embeddings, speaker ID).
    DSP, ffmpeg/decoding, ONNX/TensorRT, reproducible pipelines.

  • Contribute to backend when needed (Nest.js/Node.js, REST/OpenAPI, Postgres/Supabase).

  • Work on applied ML around LLMs: RAG, function-calling, routing, safety, A/B testing.

  • Design reliable real-time systems: backpressure, retries, idempotency, batching, caching.

  • Build data workflows: collection, cleaning, anonymization, synthetic data, offline/online eval.

  • Own observability & SLOs: Prometheus, Grafana, Sentry, tracing, alerting.

  • Deploy and operate infra: Docker, GitHub Actions, LiveKit Cloud, Modal/AWS (GPU inference).

What We Value

  • Ability to move fast and deliver (high-intensity, startup mindset).

  • Experience in big tech / strong VC-backed startups / Yandex / research labs.

  • Any founder experience (even failed).

  • Strong engineering fundamentals + taste in product & design.

  • Open-source contributions, ML/algorithms background, Kaggle/CF/olympiads are a plus.

  • A public presence: blog, Twitter, engineering posts bonus points.

  • Clear communication and ability to explain complex systems simply.

We do not hire from outsourcing firms, Web3, or gambling.

What We Offer

  • High-ownership role with direct impact on product and roadmap.

  • Work directly with CEO/CTO every day.

  • Competitive salary + meaningful equity (company valued at ~$20M last year).

  • Fully async remote, any timezone (via Deel).

  • US visa support (O-1).

  • 12 global offsites per year (last one Bali).

  • Clear growth path: compensation increases with delivered projects.

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