Senior / Principal AI Engineer - LiveKit + Agentic / Backend - 50L range

Hiring for: A US based well funded startup building low-latency, agentic voice AI systems at production scale.

Role: Senior / Principal AI Engineer - LiveKit + Agentic / Backend

Levels: Senior 5yrs+, Principal 10yrs+

Location: Bengaluru

Type: Hybrid - 3 days Work From Office

Notice: Immediate to 30 days preferred

Salary: Based on fitment (35L to 50L+ ESOPs for Seniors, 65L to 85L+ ESOPs for Principals)

Overview:

Our client is hiring a Senior / Principal AI Engineer to build real-time, voice-first AI systems where the handoff between listening, reasoning, and responding feels seamless.

This role touches backend, real-time voice infrastructure, and LLM orchestration for production conversational systems operating over live audio and telephony.

Key Responsibilities: Build and own real-time voice AI systems using LiveKit.

• Design and run the full conversational pipeline:
• Audio ingestion (telephony / WebRTC)
• STT LLM orchestration tool execution TTS
• Optimize for low latency, reliability, and scale.
• Handle concurrency, session lifecycle, and multi-turn conversations.
• Debug real-world voice issues (latency, jitter, dropped audio, barge-in).
• Work closely with product/design to deliver natural voice experiences.

Required Experience:

• Strong hands-on experience with low-latency backend or real-time systems.
• Experience with LiveKit (highly preferred) or similar real-time audio / WebRTC platforms.
• Solid understanding of telephony (SIP, call routing, trunking, CPaaS).
• Experience integrating STT/TTS into live systems.
• Hands-on LLM orchestration in real-time environments.
• Proven ability to reason about and improve end-to-end latency.
• Built production voice agents or IVR replacements.

Good to Have:

• Experience with multi-turn dialogue systems.
• Familiarity with observability for real-time systems.
• Ownership of customer-facing, reliability-critical systems.

What this role is not:

• Research or prompt-engineering focused
• Speech-model or linguistics work
• Generic chatbot / LLM app development