Senior AI Platform Engineer / Technical Lead – LLM Applications, Voice, and Real-Time Systems - Contract to Hire

We are building Sona, an AI communication platform designed for executives and professionals.

Sona helps users instantly rewrite messages in their own voice and persona so every interaction is clear, consistent, and authentic.

The platform combines real-time AI orchestration, persona modeling, and voice interaction to create a deeply personalized communication experience.

We are looking for a senior engineer and technical lead who can work closely with senior management while helping coordinate development across internal engineers and external vendors.

This role is ideal for someone who is comfortable operating in a fast-moving startup environment, who enjoys both building systems directly and helping guide technical execution across a small but growing team.

The right person will play a key role in stabilizing the platform, improving engineering processes, and ensuring that development work across engineers and vendors is coordinated, efficient, and aligned with product priorities.

Core Responsibilities Work directly with the founding team and senior leadership to help translate product goals into clear technical execution plans.

Coordinate development efforts across internal engineers and external vendors to ensure workstreams stay aligned and deliverables are completed on schedule.

Serve as a technical lead helping guide architecture decisions, engineering standards, and system reliability as the platform moves toward broader deployment.

Contribute hands-on engineering work across the platform, particularly in backend services and AI infrastructure.

Improve code quality, system architecture, and performance across the stack.

Help implement stronger engineering discipline including CI/CD processes, automated testing, release management, and observability.

Support and mentor other engineers by helping prioritize work, reviewing technical decisions, and maintaining strong engineering hygiene.

Assist senior management in understanding technical risks, architecture tradeoffs, and development timelines so product decisions can be made with clarity.

Current Technical Environment Flutter desktop and mobile client applications AWS Lambda serverless backend MongoDB Atlas LLM orchestration and prompt pipelines Speech-to-text and voice interaction layers Integration with modern AI infrastructure providers What We Are Looking For Strong backend engineering experience in Python, Node.js, or similar languages.

Experience building or working with AI or LLM-powered applications in production environments.

Ability to operate as both a hands-on engineer and a technical coordinator helping manage development flow across multiple contributors.

Comfort working directly with founders and senior leadership in a fast-moving startup environment.

Strong debugging skills and the ability to reason about system architecture, performance, and reliability.

Experience helping organize engineering work, coordinating across teams, and ensuring development efforts stay focused and productive.

Bonus Experience Voice interfaces or speech processing systems.

LLM latency optimization or multi-model orchestration.

AI infrastructure performance tuning.

Experience coordinating engineering work across distributed teams or vendor relationships Engagement Contract role with potential to expand into a longer-term leadership role as the company grows.

Remote friendly.

Opportunity to work directly with senior leadership and help shape the technical foundation of an emerging AI platform.