Tech Lead (Voice AI Architect)

Hireologist; India; On-site; INR 400,000 - 900,000; Full time

Job summary

Hireologist is seeking a senior Speech & ML engineer with 7–10 years in ML/speech engineering and 2+ years architecting production voice pipelines. You will lead vendor decisions for ASR/TTS, own latency budgets to achieve sub-1.5s round trips, and mentor a team of Conversational AI and ML/Voice engineers while shaping the hiring bar.

The role emphasizes production-scale ASR with dialect handling for Indian and UAE markets, latency optimization, and cost-aware design across SIP/WebRTC

Qualifications

• Production experience with at least one ASR engine (Whisper, Deepgram, Google STT, Azure Speech) at scale.
• Comfortable working across Hindi/Hinglish and English accent handling for Indian/UAE markets.
• Experience handling dialect variation and code-switching (e.g. Hinglish, Gulf Arabic variants) in production ASR/NLU.
• LLM & Conversational AI.
• Hands-on experience with LLM-based dialogue systems (function calling, RAG, or fine-tuning).
• Strong grasp of telephony integration: SIP, WebRTC, Twilio/Exotel/Ozonetel or similar.
• Performance & Optimization.
• Experience optimizing for latency and cost simultaneously in a live voice pipeline.
• Track record of hitting production accuracy benchmarks: 95%+ transcription (WER-based) accuracy and 90%+ intent classification accuracy at scale — not just in a demo.

Responsibilities

• Make build-vs-buy calls on ASR/TTS vendors (Deepgram, Azure Speech, ElevenLabs, or open-source Whisper/Coqui).
• Own latency budget across the pipeline (target sub-1.5s round-trip for live calls).
• Mentor Conversational AI and ML/Voice engineers; own technical hiring bar.

Skills

ASR deployment

Accent handling

Dialect variation

LLM & Conversational AI

Dialogue systems (RAG/finetune)

Telephony integration

Latency optimization

Production ML/Voice

Hiring mentorship

Tools

Deepgram

Azure Speech

Whisper/Coqui

Job description

Experience: 7–10 years in ML/speech engineering, with 2+ years architecting production voice pipelines

Responsibilities

• Make build-vs-buy calls on ASR/TTS vendors (Deepgram, Azure Speech, ElevenLabs, or open-source Whisper/Coqui)
• Own latency budget across the pipeline (target sub-1.5s round-trip for live calls)
• Mentor Conversational AI and ML/Voice engineers; own technical hiring bar

Qualifications

• Must-Have Technical Qualifications
• Production experience with at least one ASR engine (Whisper, Deepgram, Google STT, Azure Speech) at scale
• Comfortable working across Hindi/Hinglish and English accent handling for Indian/UAE markets
• Experience handling dialect variation and code-switching (e.g. Hinglish, Gulf Arabic variants) in production ASR/NLU
• LLM & Conversational AI
• Hands-on experience with LLM-based dialogue systems (function calling, RAG, or fine-tuning)
• Strong grasp of telephony integration: SIP, WebRTC, Twilio/Exotel/Ozonetel or similar
• Performance & Optimization
• Experience optimizing for latency and cost simultaneously in a live voice pipeline
• Track record of hitting production accuracy benchmarks: 95%+ transcription (WER-based) accuracy and 90%+ intent classification accuracy at scale — not just in a demo

Required Skills

• Good-to-Have
• Prior experience at Amazon Alexa, Microsoft Cortana/Speech, Google Assistant, or a voice-AI startup
• Exposure to Arabic ASR/TTS for UAE market
• 2+ years hands-on with LLMs/Generative AI in a production (not POC) setting