Lead Voice AI Engineer

Who We Are Simpplr is the AI-powered intranet for unifying the digital workplace. It brings people, trusted knowledge, apps, and agents into a coherent digital experience. Powered by a proprietary EX Knowledge Graph, Simpplr synthesizes signals and context across connected systems to deliver personalized information and actions. The platform serves as a digital hub supporting communications, engagement, employee services, and work. With low-code extensibility and enterprise-grade security and governance, Simpplr enables confident operation at scale. More than 1,000 organizations — including AAA, the NHS, Penske, and Moderna — trust Simpplr to keep their workforce informed, aligned, and productive. Learn more at simpplr.com . About the role We are looking for a Lead Voice AI Engineer to build production-grade Voice Agents for frontline heavy verticals like healthcare, manufacturing, warehousing, retail, hospitality focusing on employee support, procurement, collections, logistics, ordering etc. You will lead the design of low-latency, real-time voice systems combining ASR, TTS, LLMs, conversational AI, enterprise workflows, knowledge retrieval, compliance, and human handoff. This is a hands-on technical leadership role for someone who can take Voice AI from architecture to production. Responsibilities • Design and build the real-time voice runtime for live conversations. • Build and optimize streaming ASR, TTS, VAD, endpointing, turn-taking, and barge-in. • Build adaptive voice pipelines for high-noise frontline environments (60-112 dB), hospitals, factory floors, warehouses, including server-side noise cancellation, echo suppression, and dynamic ASR/TTS optimization for PSTN and mobile phone audio quality. • Architect multi-provider speech routing across a broad multilingual matrix, including code-switching (e.g., Spanglish, Hinglish), where no single ASR or TTS provider covers all languages, and language detection, provider selection, and fallback chains must operate in real time mid-call. • Develop Voice Agents that support multi-turn, multi-intent conversations, context switching, clarification, and recovery. • Integrate Voice Agents with workflows, APIs, CRM, ITSM, knowledge bases, and enterprise systems. • Build secure identity verification, consent, privacy, audit, and compliance controls. • Implement warm transfer, callback, queue routing, and seamless human handoff with full conversation context. • Optimize multilingual voice quality across accents, noisy environments, latency, and naturalness. • Build evaluation frameworks for WER, intent accuracy, response latency, containment, resolution, escalation, and CSAT. • Establish production observability across the full call path: ASR → LLM → tools → TTS. • Evaluate and integrate leading speech, telephony, and AI technologies. • Define architecture, engineering standards, and production readiness for the Voice AI platform. • Mentor engineers and lead critical technical design reviews. M∂inimum qualifications • 7+ years of software engineering experience. • Strong experience building production distributed or real-time systems. • Hands-on experience with Conversational AI, Voice AI, Speech AI, or LLM-based agents. • Strong programming skills in Python, Java, Go, or equivalent. • Experience with APIs, streaming systems, asynchronous architectures, and cloud-native platforms. • Strong understanding of system design, scalability, reliability, and observability. Preferred qualifications • Hands-on experience with Deepgram for real-time ASR and streaming speech recognition. • Hands-on experience with LiveKit for WebRTC, real-time audio, voice-agent runtime, and session orchestration. • Hands-on experience with ElevenLabs for low-latency, natural TTS and