Lead AI Engineer

Chrona agency; Remote; GBP 80,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

A forward-thinking AI startup is seeking a senior hands-on engineer to lead the development of a real-time Voice AI Agent. This role offers high-ownership responsibilities and the opportunity to work directly with the CEO and CTO. Candidates should have strong engineering fundamentals, experience in machine learning, and a passion for product design. The position is remote-friendly with meaningful equity and compensation packages. Ideal for those with startup experience and a fast-paced work ethic.

Benefits

Competitive salary

Equity

Global offsites

US visa support

Qualifications

• Experience with real-time audio and machine learning applications.
• Strong engineering fundamentals with a taste for product and design.
• Ability to work in a high-intensity startup environment.

Responsibilities

• Build and scale the Real-Time Voice AI Agent.
• Develop and ship the ML toolkit for production.
• Design reliable real-time systems with observability.

Skills

Real-Time Systems Design

Audio Processing

Machine Learning

Backend Development

Project Management

Tools

Docker

GitHub Actions

AWS

ONNX

TensorRT

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 and ship our ML toolkit: ASR, TTS, VAD, embeddings, speaker ID models to production.
• Implement DSP pipelines (ffmpeg, decoding) using ONNX/TensorRT and ensure reproducibility.
• Contribute to backend where needed (REST/OpenAPI, Postgres/Supabase).
• Apply LLMs to audio: 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 evaluation.
• 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/ research labs.
• Founder experience (even failed).
• Strong engineering fundamentals with a taste for 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 and 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.

Key Skills

Administrative Skills, Facilities Management, Biotechnology, Creative Production, Design And Estimation, Architecture

Employment Type

Full Time

Experience

years

Vacancy

1