Real-Time Voice AI Agent Systems Engineer
About The Position
HireNow Staffing is actively recruiting a highly skilled Real-Time Voice AI Agent Systems Engineer to join one of our valued client partners. This is a high-ownership engineering opportunity for someone capable of building production-grade voice AI infrastructure and conversational agent systems from the ground up. The selected engineer will own the technical foundation behind millions of real-world AI voice interactions—from LiveKit architecture and orchestration to prompting, speech performance, testing, reliability, and continuous optimization. This position requires more than traditional backend development. The successful candidate must understand how infrastructure, conversational logic, speech systems, latency, and business outcomes intersect. The engineer will have significant ownership over how AI agents communicate, respond, recover from edge cases, and perform at scale.
Requirements
- 3+ years of platform, infrastructure, backend, or comparable production engineering experience.
- 2+ years of experience involving voice AI, conversational AI, speech systems, prompt engineering, or related agentic workflows.
- Strong hands-on development experience with Node.js.
- Strong experience with AWS and SQL.
- Experience designing and shipping production systems within a startup or similarly fast-moving engineering environment.
- Hands-on experience with LiveKit or a comparable voice orchestration/agent framework.
- Strong understanding of real-time system architecture, state management, reliability, and performance optimization.
- Demonstrated ability to design clear, resilient, and effective conversational prompts and agent flows.
- Strong analytical ability with experience connecting engineering decisions to measurable operational or business outcomes.
- Excellent written and verbal English communication skills.
- High degree of technical ownership and ability to execute with limited oversight.
- Must reside in or be willing to relocate to the New York City area.
- Must be able to work onsite in Manhattan 4–5 days per week.
- Must be permanently authorized to work in the United States. No visa sponsorship is available.
Nice To Haves
- Production experience with SIP trunking and telephony infrastructure.
- Experience developing real-time audio pipelines.
- Knowledge of call routing, telephony carriers, and communication integrations.
- Experience operating speech infrastructure at significant production scale.
- Advanced knowledge of ASR/STT, TTS, interruption management, latency optimization, and conversational turn-taking.
- Experience building evaluation frameworks for production AI agents.
- Background in debt collection, financial services, fintech, or regulated consumer communications.
- Experience working in an early-stage or Seed-stage startup environment.
- Experience connecting agent-performance metrics to conversion, containment, satisfaction, or other commercial KPIs.
Responsibilities
- Build and own production voice AI infrastructure using LiveKit.
- Architect real-time voice-agent systems covering orchestration, state management, reliability, latency, and conversational execution.
- Develop the prompting architecture governing conversation flows, tone, guardrails, compliant phrasing, exception handling, and agent behavior.
- Create scalable testing and evaluation frameworks incorporating A/B testing, regression testing, conversation QA, benchmarking, and KPI measurement.
- Analyze production interaction data and translate findings into measurable improvements in agent performance.
- Optimize ASR, STT, TTS, turn-taking, interruption handling, state transitions, and real-time conversational responsiveness.
- Build infrastructure capable of reliably supporting millions of voice interactions.
- Develop migration tooling and processes for transitioning customers from legacy voice infrastructure while preserving required customizations.
- Identify and resolve performance bottlenecks, reliability issues, conversational failures, and production edge cases.
- Partner closely with Product, Operations, and leadership to translate commercial objectives into technical systems and effective agent behavior.
- Continuously expand conversational coverage as new customer scenarios and operational requirements emerge.
Benefits
- Equity participation included.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
