Tech Lead, AI Engineer (Applied​/Software)

About the Role

We're a Y Combinator-backed startup building AI-powered voice and messaging agents for enterprise call centers — automating customer service, lead qualification, and appointment scheduling nded in 2023 and operating in a fast-moving space alongside players like Parloa, Vapi, Retell AI, and Cognigy, we're a small, high-velocity team looking for a Tech Lead to help shape our engineering foundation and take us through our next phase of growth.

This is a hands-on leadership role — you'll be writing code, making architectural decisions, and directly mentoring engineers. If you're excited about conversational AI, love building real products that ship to production, and want a clear path toward CTO-track influence, this could be a great fit.

• Design, build, and lead AI/ML systems powering voice and text-based conversational agents in production

• Define and drive the engineering strategy, balancing short-term delivery with long-term scalability

• Mentor and grow a team of engineers, fostering a culture of ownership, quality, and continuous improvement

• Collaborate cross-functionally with product, research, and go-to-market teams to translate business goals into technical roadmaps

• Advocate for and communicate technical decisions clearly to non-technical stakeholders

• Own deployment and reliability of ML models and cloud infrastructure in a SaaS environment

• Stay current with the latest developments in LLMs, NLP, and voice AI — and bring the best ideas into the product

Required:

• 6–10+ years of software/ML engineering experience, with a meaningful portion in leadership or staff-level roles

• Proven experience designing and scaling AI/ML systems, ideally at a cloud-based SaaS company or high-growth startup

• Hands-on expertise with conversational AI, voice technology, and/or NLP/LLM applications

• Strong command of cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and deploying ML models to production

• Demonstrated people management and mentorship skills — you've led engineers and driven engineering culture

• Excellent communication skills; comfortable bridging technical and non-technical audiences

• Must have the right to work in the United States —
  no visa sponsorship is available

Nice to Have:

• Experience in call center, customer service automation, or enterprise voice platforms

• Background at an AI-focused startup or conversational AI platform

• Familiarity with real-time audio/speech pipelines or telephony integrations

• Prior experience scaling an engineering team from early-stage through Series A/B

Compensation details will be discussed during the interview process and will be competitive with early-stage AI startup benchmarks, including equity commensurate with the Tech Lead seniority level.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA
. We are an in-person / hybrid team — candidates who prefer fully remote arrangements are not a strong fit at this stage. Relocation is welcome; visa sponsorship is not available.