Real-Time Voice AI Engineer (WebRTC & LLMs)

Wati Dot I O; Hong Kong; On-site; HKD 942,000 - 1,413,000; Full time

Job summary

Wati is seeking an Agentic Engineer – Voice AI to build and scale real-time voice AI capabilities on WhatsApp. In this role, you will develop the systems that allow AI agents to listen, think, and speak in real time over WhatsApp voice calls.

This includes building and optimizing the real-time media pipeline (WebRTC, LiveKit), integrating frontier AI models (OpenAI Realtime API, Google Gemini Live), and engineering the cascade architecture that connects speech recognition, language models, and

Qualifications

• 3+ years of software engineering experience with backend focus (Go or Python).
• Experience with real-time communication technologies: WebRTC, RTP/RTCP, audio codecs, or media servers.
• Familiarity with AI/LLM integration and model APIs, tool calling, and orchestration.
• Experience with speech technologies: ASR, TTS, voice activity detection, or audio pipelines.
• Knowledge of distributed systems and cloud-native architectures (GCP preferred).
• Experience with PostgreSQL, Redis, and pub/sub messaging systems.
• Strong problem-solving ability and ability to work in fast-paced, ambiguity-rich environments.
• Ability to debug latency-sensitive systems by reading code, traces, and real-time metrics.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and optimize real-time voice AI pipelines — from WebRTC media transport to LLM inference and speech synthesis
• Integrate and orchestrate frontier AI models including OpenAI Realtime API, Google Gemini multimodal live, and cascade architectures (ASR LLM TTS)
• Build and maintain the media infrastructure: LiveKit-based audio routing, Opus codec handling, RTP/RTCP transport, and voice activity detection
• Develop agent capabilities for voice interactions — tool calling, function execution, context engineering, and multi-turn conversation management
• Optimize end-to-end latency across the voice pipeline, from audio capture to AI response playback
• Collaborate with product and platform teams to deliver production-grade voice AI experiences on WhatsApp
• Ensure reliability, performance, and scalability of voice AI infrastructure serving customers across 190+ countries

Skills

Go

Python

Real-time communication

AI/LLM integration

Speech technologies

Distributed systems

PostgreSQL

Redis

Pub/Sub

Problem solving

Latency debugging

Tools

WebRTC

LiveKit

Opus codec

RTP/RTCP

OpenAI Realtime API

Google Gemini Live

Job description

Wati is seeking an Agentic Engineer – Voice AI to build and scale real-time voice AI capabilities on WhatsApp. In this role, you will develop the systems that allow AI agents to listen, think, and speak in real time over WhatsApp voice calls.

This includes building and optimizing the real-time media pipeline (WebRTC, LiveKit), integrating frontier AI models (OpenAI Realtime API, Google Gemini Live), and engineering the cascade architecture that connects speech recognition, language models, and