Lead AI Engineer – Agentic Systems & Voice AI

Keka Technologies Private Limited; Hyderabad; On-site; INR 3,500,000 - 7,000,000; Full time

Job summary

Keka Technologies Private Limited in Hyderabad is seeking a highly experienced Lead AI Engineer to architect, deploy, and scale 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.

You will bridge client workflows with scalable AI capabilities, optimize backend execution, and ensure seamless human-computer interaction at enterprise scale across Indian languages

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering and AI/ML experience.
• 3+ years architecting and deploying agentic LLM systems in production.
• Deep understanding of backend, distributed systems and high-concurrency environments.

Responsibilities

• Design conversational AI pipelines with ASR-LLM-TTS.
• Integrate AI inference with telephony APIs (Twilio/Exotel/Plivo).
• Orchestrate agentic workflows using state machines and external APIs.
• Optimize latency: TTFT, TTFA, and RTF; apply quantization and dynamic batching.
• Lead multilingual, Indian-language systems with code-switching handling.
• Ensure scalable, event-driven backends with real-time observability.

Skills

Python

C++

Go

AI/ML

Tools

Apache Kafka

Temporal

PostgreSQL

ClickHouse

WebRTC

Job description

5 to 8 years

Hyderabad office

Full-Time

Role Overview

We 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.

Core Responsibilities

• 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.
• 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).
• Agentic 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Backend & 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.

Required Qualifications & Experience

• Experience 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.
• 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).
• 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.
• Optimization & Serving: Hands-on experience with high-performance inference servers (e.g., vLLM, NVIDIA Triton, TensorRT) and optimization techniques for large-scale model deployment.
• 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.

Bonus / Preferred Qualifications

• Deep 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.

Ideal Technical Stack

• Languages: Python, C++, Go (for high-performance backend components)
• Telephony & Audio: WebRTC, standard telecom APIs (Twilio/Exotel), standard audio encoding (8kHz µ-law/A-law)
• Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry (focusing on sub-millisecond tracing for audio/text pipelines)