AI Edge Solution Architect – Edge​/Cloud Voice AI

Our client is advancing its in-vehicle voice assistant into an intelligent, AI-powered companion. Large-language-model capabilities (Azure OpenAI / ChatGPT) have been running in production across vehicles. The goal of the project is to develop a backend which is the cloud AI orchestration service behind this: it receives requests from the vehicle, routes them, orchestrates the LLM, tool services and agents, and returns an answer or action to the car.

DXC Luxoft serves as the end-to-end delivery partner, working in a joint product team with the client s engineers on the Azure platform.

This is the series development and operations work package - a live platform serving a large vehicle fleet, which extends sprint by sprint the backend features while availability and backward compatibility are maintained. New capability in the pipeline includes streaming across the full ASR → LLM → TTS chain, barge-in, multi-intent handling, a guardrails layer for deterministic vehicle-safe answers, agent routing and new tool integrations.

The role is Technical Lead and Location Lead for the engineering team. It is a hands-on delivery leadership role: the person is accountable for what the team ships, for the service running inside its availability and incident targets, and for the technical growth of the location.

Work package A — Concept development & pre-development (research, evaluation, prototyping)

• Own the system architecture for hybrid (cloud/edge) voice assistant systems — define the edge/cloud allocation model, routing criteria, and the port/adapter boundaries that allow functions to move between cloud and vehicle without redesign.
• Design and oversee end-to-end prototype pipelines (ASR → LLM → TTS), including integration into early vehicle platforms (E³, SDV) and test operation in lab and driving environments.
• Drive evaluation and benchmarking of base components: on-device ASR for edge hardware, modern TTS models (latency, robustness, audio quality, energy efficiency), and candidate LLMs for dialogue-based assistant functions via Azure AI Foundry.
• Define RAG architectures for improved knowledge coverage and robustness, including embedding strategies and small-scale vector stores for specific automotive use cases.
• Architect the embedded/edge AI optimisation workstream: quantisation, pruning and distillation for ARM/DSP/NPU targets, with explicit attention to memory footprint, energy consumption, wake-word efficiency and thermal behaviour.
• Shape the research agenda for future key technologies — continual learning and on-device model adaptation (anti-drift), multimodal interaction (speech + image + vehicle sensor data), emotion and sentiment recognition, privacy-compliant on-device personalisation and long-term memory, multi-speaker handling, speaker identification and anti-spoofing.
• Embed safety, security and privacy mechanisms into concepts from the start (differential privacy, secure enclaves, automotive security standards) and ensure interoperability with vehicle architectures (SOA, microservices, zonal architecture).
• Apply and enforce hexagonal architecture as the structural standard, so prototypes are transferable into series development rather than thrown away.
• Produce the technical concepts, architecture decision records and evaluation reports that hand research results over to the series development work package — and defend them in review with the client s architects.
• Lead the offshore engineering team as Location Lead: technical direction for AI/ML and AI Ops engineers, code and design review standards, work breakdown and estimation across a high-throughput ticket flow (~30 tickets/sprint, sizes S/M/L), onboarding and skills growth.
• Act as the offshore technical…