Lead AI Engineer at Chrona Agency

We are a YC-backed AI startup building the worlds most advanced real-time Speech AI coach used in online calls. Over the past six months, weve grown from $100k to $5M ARR, raised $2.5M from top-tier investors, and assembled a world-class engineering team (ex-Google, Nvidia, Lyft, Amazon) solving hard problems in voice, ML, and real-time infrastructure.We are looking for a senior, hands-on engineer to lead development of our real-time Voice AI Agent and internal ML toolkit. Youll own end-to-end systems across real-time audio, applied ML, and production deployment working directly with our CEO and CTO. What Youll Do 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). What We Value Ability to move fast and deliver (high-intensity, startup mindset). Experience in big tech / strong VC-backed startups / Yandex / research labs. Any founder experience (even failed). Strong engineering fundamentals + taste in product & design. Open-source contributions, ML/algorithms background, Kaggle/CF/olympiads are a plus. A public presence: blog, Twitter, engineering posts bonus points. Clear communication and ability to explain complex systems simply. We do not hire from outsourcing firms, Web3, or gambling. What We Offer High-ownership role with direct impact on product and roadmap. Work directly with CEO/CTO every day. 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.