Lead Engineer

Responsibilities

• Directly manage a pod of engineers responsible for Canary's Voice AI product, including inbound call handling, reservation booking and modification flows, service request creation, and intelligent call transfer
• Set an example as an IC in terms of both the quality and velocity of code that you ship
• Own the architecture and its evolution across telephony integrations (Twilio, Bandwidth, etc), real-time AI components (Deepgram, ElevenLabs, OpenAI), and integration points with PMS Gateway, CRS Gateway, and the Ticket Gateway
• Drive measurable improvements in call containment, transfer quality, latency, and cost-per-call by deeply understanding metrics and how hotels and guests use the product
• Partner closely with Product Managers to inform roadmap and prioritization, with a strong voice on product decisions for the Voice AI surface area
• Independently mentor and advise engineers in the pod, and build engineering execution plans, break down work, and assign it across the team
• Run pod processes autonomously and escalate appropriately when required
• Participate in hiring and interviewing for the Voice AI team and broader engineering org

Qualifications

• 8+ years of a strong engineering background
• 2+ years of proven experience of leading successful engineering teams
• Solid knowledge of developing backend applications
• Hands-on experience building real-time or streaming systems — voice, audio, video, or low-latency event-driven services
• Have a strong demonstrated ability to ship high-quality products that operate reliably at scale
• Self-motivated, collaborative, and diligent work ethic
• Excellent communication skills. You love being part of a diverse team, building consensus, and establishing credibility. You are a Class-A communicator: curious, thoughtful, clear, and (mostly) correct
• Comfort with ambiguity and is eager to embrace ownership and accountability
• Bonus: Experience with conversational AI, LLM agent frameworks (e.g. LiveKit Agents, Pipecat), telephony (Twilio, SIP), ASR/TTS providers (Deepgram, ElevenLabs, Cartesia), or evaluations / testing harnesses for agentic systems