Senior AI Engineer — Conversational Voice AI

About SmartAdvocate SmartAdvocate is an industry-leading legal case management platform used by 20000+ legal professionals across North America from solo practitioners to large multi-office firms. We are embedding advanced AI directly into the core of the platform to automate complex legal workflows modernize firm operations and generate deep document intelligence. What you would be joining This is not a greenfield AI experiment. SmartAdvocate already runs a suite of AI services in production document classification and data extraction medical chronology generation demand letter drafting case chat over vectorized case documents an agent runtime and an MCP server that lets external AI platforms operate directly against case data. Voice is the next frontier intake voice agents that handle new-case calls end to end a receptionist agent that answers client questions from live case context and outbound agents that confirm appointments chase medical records and keep clients updated. You would own that work. Position overview We are looking for a hands-on senior engineer to build our conversational voice AI enterprise-grade voice agents wired into telephony that handle intake and client calls understand the caller's case and write structured results straight into the case file. This is a build-and-operate role. You will design the pipelines ship them and own them in production.

Key responsibilities

Voice agents and telephony Architect build and deploy conversational voice agents that interact with callers leads and clients. Integrate with VoIP/SIP and cloud communications platforms (Twilio Plivo Amazon Connect LiveKit) across the topologies our customers actually use call forwarding conferencing an SA number onto a live call and full number porting — so we work with any firm's phone system. Handle the realities of live calls barge-in and turn-taking interruptions poor reception accents background noise and graceful degradation when confidence drops. Optimize real-time STT TTS NLU and latency budgets select and tune voices for naturalness. Design warm transfer and escalation — handing a call to a human with full context and recognizing high-value or urgent situations that should be routed immediately. Live data extraction and write-back Build real-time pipelines that transcribe parse and structure call conversations to populate case fields create intake records update case notes and trigger downstream workflows automatically. Record and summarize every call into the case file with clear provenance for anything the agent entered. Detect the caller's language and respond in it — Spanish is our first priority after English. Safety configuration and operations Design caller identification and authentication before any case information is disclosed. Caller ID alone is not identity. Make behavior configurable per firm operating hours and after-hours coverage outbound calling windows by callee type and time zone escalation rules voice selection. Build guardrails fallbacks structured logging and call/transcript retention that stand up to an audit. Own the service in production latency budgets monitoring alerting failover and on-call. A law firm's main phone line is the most availability-critical asset we would ever touch. Required qualifications Demonstrable production experience building conversational voice agents integrated with telephony infrastructure — SIP/RTP WebRTC Twilio Media Streams LiveKit Deepgram ElevenLabs Vapi Retell or similar. Real-time audio pipeline engineering streaming STT and TTS sub-second response handling concurrency and latency profiling under real load. Pipeline engineering for extracting structured JSON or database payloads from live audio streams. Strong Python service development (FastAPI/async or equivalent) and clean REST API design. LLM integration in production function/tool calling structured outputs prompt and context engineering cost and latency tuning. Event-driven and asynchronous patterns queues background workers retries and idempotency. Evaluating conversational quality systematically — test suites transcript review and regression testing when prompts or models change. Production ownership containerized deployment CI/CD monitoring structured logging and having personally debugged a live outage.

Nice to have

Telephony compliance state call-recording and consent law TCPA permitted calling windows spam-labeling and verified-number strategy. C .NET / ASP.NET and Microsoft SQL Server — our core platform though the AI services are Python. Prior experience developing software for the legal medical insurance or other regulated industries. Multi-language voice with Spanish as the priority. Caller authentication patterns including callback-to-number-on-file and PIN or knowledge-based verification. Understanding of HIPAA PHI handling and attorney-client privilege constraints for AI applications. Working knowledge of voice AI unit economics — per-minute cost model selection and cost-per-call optimization. How we hire We read work not keywords. Our process is deliberately short Resume and portfolio review A 45-minute conversation about systems you have built and operated A short technical exercise against a realistic problem from our actual domain — not a whiteboard puzzle A final conversation with our CTO and the AI team

What we offer

SALARY RANGE — $120000.00 - 160000.00 Comprehensive benefits package LOCATION Remote (US) — or Hybrid Melville NY Reports to the CTO relationship to the existing AI Architect and AI development team. The chance to lead high-impact AI work on an established platform with real customers real data and problems that are not yet solved anywhere in legal tech Pay $120000.00 - $160000.00 per year

Benefits

401(k) 401(k) matching Dental insurance Flexible spending account Health insurance Health savings account Life insurance Paid time off Parental leave Vision insurance

Work Location

Remote