[Remote] Lead AI Engineer (Speech / Voice)

Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. CHRONA is a YC-backed AI startup building the world's most advanced real-time Speech AI coach used in online calls. They are looking for a senior, hands-on engineer to lead the development of their real-time Voice AI Agent and internal ML toolkit, owning end-to-end systems across real-time audio, applied ML, and production deployment. Responsibilities • Build and scale our Real-Time Voice AI Agent (LiveKit/WebRTC): streaming ASR/TTS, VAD, diarization, state machines, session management, latency/QoS tuning. • Develop our ML toolkit and ship models to prod (ASR, TTS, VAD, embeddings, speaker ID). DSP, ffmpeg/decoding, ONNX/TensorRT, reproducible pipelines. • Contribute to backend when needed (Nest.js/Node.js, REST/OpenAPI, Postgres/Supabase). • Work on applied ML around LLMs: RAG, function-calling, routing, safety, A/B testing. • Design reliable real-time systems: backpressure, retries, idempotency, batching, caching. • Build data workflows: collection, cleaning, anonymization, synthetic data, offline/online eval. • Own observability & SLOs: Prometheus, Grafana, Sentry, tracing, alerting. • Deploy and operate infra: Docker, GitHub Actions, LiveKit Cloud, Modal/AWS (GPU inference). Skills • Ability to move fast and deliver (high-intensity, startup mindset). • Experience in big tech / strong VC-backed startups / Yandex / research labs. • Strong engineering fundamentals + taste in product & design. • Clear communication and ability to explain complex systems simply. • Any founder experience (even failed). • Open-source contributions, ML/algorithms background, Kaggle/CF/olympiads are a plus. • A public presence: blog, Twitter, engineering posts bonus points. Benefits • Competitive salary + meaningful equity (company valued at ~$20M last year). • Fully async remote, any timezone (via Deel). • US visa support (O-1). • 12 global offsites per year (last one Bali). • Clear growth path: compensation increases with delivered projects. Company Overview • Chrona Agency — продвинутый HR-партнер для подбора персонала в индустриях Web3, AI и Tech. It was founded in undefined, and is headquartered in , with a workforce of 11-50 employees. Its website is Apply tot his job