Artificial Intelligence Engineer

About the role
Hunar.ai is hiring an AI Engineer to build and improve our Voice AI pipeline: the system that listens, understands and speaks back to users in real time. You will spend most of your time on this pipeline, from speech recognition through language models to speech synthesis, and on the infrastructure that keeps it fast and reliable at scale.
This role suits an engineer with at least 3 years of experience who enjoys hard systems problems. Voice is unforgiving: a few hundred milliseconds of extra latency or a dropped connection is felt immediately by the user. You will own those trade-offs end to end.
What you'll do
- Design, build and maintain the real-time Voice AI pipeline: audio capture and streaming, voice activity detection, speech-to-text (ASR), LLM orchestration, and text-to-speech (TTS).
- Drive down end-to-end latency, including time to first audio byte, turn-taking and interruption (barge-in) handling, so conversations feel natural.
- Improve quality: transcription accuracy, response relevance and voice naturalness, measured with clear evaluation metrics and test sets.
- Architect services that scale to many concurrent real-time sessions, with sensible load balancing, autoscaling and graceful degradation.
- Design data models and storage for conversations, transcripts, session state and analytics, choosing the right database and caching strategy for each.
- Integrate and evaluate third-party and open-source ASR, LLM and TTS models, and make build-versus-buy decisions with cost and latency in mind.
- Own reliability in production: monitoring, alerting, tracing, incident response and post-incident fixes.
- Work closely with product, research and infrastructure teams, and write clear design documents for the systems you build.
What we're looking for
- 3+ years of professional software engineering experience building and running backend or ML systems in production.
- Strong system design skills: you can design a distributed, low-latency service, explain its trade-offs and defend your choices.
- Hands-on experience scaling systems: horizontal scaling, load balancing, caching, queues and asynchronous processing, rate limiting and capacity planning.
- Solid database fundamentals: relational and NoSQL data modelling, indexing, query optimisation, transactions and isolation levels, replication, sharding and consistency trade-offs.
- Proficiency in Python. Knowledge of Go will be a bonus.
- Experience with real-time or streaming communication, such as WebSockets, gRPC streaming or event-driven architectures.
- Practical experience integrating ML or LLM models into production applications, including prompt design, evaluation and cost control.
- Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP or Azure), containers and Kubernetes, and CI/CD.
- Clear written and verbal communication, and comfort owning ambiguous problems end to end.
Nice to have
A very big bonus: familiarity with running open-source models (ASR, LLM or TTS) on GPUs, such as self-hosting and serving them with tools like vLLM, TensorRT-LLM or Triton, and managing GPU capacity and cost.
Also valued:
- Experience building or operating voice AI in production systems, such as voice agents, contact-centre automation or voice assistants.
- Hands-on work with ASR and TTS models or providers (for example Whisper, Deepgram, ElevenLabs or similar), including fine-tuning or custom vocabularies.
- Knowledge of audio fundamentals: codecs, sample rates, jitter buffers, echo cancellation and noise suppression.
- Experience with WebRTC, SIP or telephony integrations.
- Experience optimising model inference: GPU serving, batching, quantisation or streaming inference.
- Experience with multilingual speech, accents or code-switching.
- Contributions to open-source speech or LLM tooling.
Role details
| Location | Bangalore |
| Employment type | Full-time |
| Experience | 3+ years |
To apply, send your CV and a short note about a system you designed or scaled that you're proud of to shantanu@hunar.ai, or apply directly using the link below:
Apply here: https://apply.hunar.ai/job/NKnUf4P5?utm=jq_af
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Work arrangement
Hybrid