Senior Voice AI Engineer

afarax is looking for a freelance Senior Voice AI Engineer. We need you!

The project:

Our client in the banking sector, is seeking an experienced Voice AI Engineer to strengthen their team.

Function description:

Voice Engineer :

• Design and implement streaming pipelines: audio ingest, VAD/endpointing, STT, orchestration/LLM, streaming TTS.
• Own turn-taking: barge-in, interruptions, end pointing tuning, silence handling, latency/accuracy tradeoffs.
• Integrate telephony and app channels (SIP/WebRTC/CPaaS)
• Implement reliability retries, backpressure, rate limiting, fallbacks between open-source and vendor components.

In addtion, AI Dev Engineers contribute by:

• Working with the Data Scientists to define and develop the target solution with production constraints in mind. This allows to select the correct run infrastructure and serving model (e.g. data ingestion scheme, API synchronicity, ...) to address the business requirements (real-time responses, processing volumetry, ...)
• Contributing to the automation of the different elements of the ML pipeline in order to integrate and deploy them in the production environment (e.g. building Docker/VM images, prepare unitary, regression and integration tests, ...)
• Supporting Data Scientists on the usage of the existing industrial solutions available to build and monitor AI services (i.e. the CI/CD tools)
• Supporting IT Production on the parameterization of the target environment
• Ensuring that the model runs without errors, is retrained if needed (incl. automatically) and is monitored both from the IT and the business perspective.

Is this you?

• English is mandatory. Dutch and/or French is a plus
• At least 4 years of relevant experience
• Strong Python + one systems language (Go/Rust/C++) preferred.
• Experience with streaming audio + WebSockets/gRPC.
• Familiarity with Whisper/NeMo/wav2vec2 or similar ASR stacks and neural TTS stacks.
• Practical telephony experience (PSTN/IVR) and/or WebRTC.
• 4+ years engineering, with 2+ years shipping streaming speech in production.
• Real-time STT + TTS + turn-taking/barge-in experience.
• Telephony: SIP/WebRTC or CPaaS integration, codecs (u-law/A-law), 8kHz realities.
• Can run evaluations: WER by cohort, latency p95, conversation KPIs.
• Comfortable integrating open-source STT/TTS and vendor APIs like Gradium.
• Containerization / virtualisation
• AI platforms & IDEs
• CI/CD (gitlab-ci)
• Code, model & data versioning
• Usage of package management tools and experience in dependency management
• Postgresql
• Speaker diarization / echo cancellation constraints knowledge.
• Experience in regulated environments (banking/insurance/health).
• Experience building semantic VAD or endpointing models.
• Experience with integration using different technologies (distributes/mainframe) and infra components
• Knowledge of agile methodology

How afarax supports you?

• You benefit from our extensive network
• You will have access to projects that fit your expertise
• We help and support you throughout your project
• We offer the possibility to build a valuable and lasting partnership

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