SmartAdvocate is hiring a Senior AI Engineer to build and operate enterprise conversational voice AI agents for legal case intake and client calls.
Responsibilities
Architect, build, and deploy conversational voice agents for callers, leads, and clients.
Integrate conversational agents with VoIP/SIP and cloud communications platforms including Twilio, Plivo, Amazon Connect, and LiveKit .
Support real customer telephony topologies: call forwarding, conferencing an SA number onto a live call, and full number porting.
Handle live-call dynamics such as barge-in and turn-taking, interruptions, poor reception, accents, and background noise.
Optimize real-time performance across STT , TTS , NLU , and latency budgets; tune voices for naturalness.
Design warm transfer and escalation workflows to hand calls to humans with full context, including routing high-value or urgent situations immediately.
Build real-time pipelines that transcribe, parse, and structure conversations to populate case fields, create intake records, update case notes, and trigger downstream workflows.
Record and summarize every call into the case file with clear provenance for agent-provided content.
Detect caller language and respond in it, with Spanish prioritized after English.
Implement caller identification and authentication before any case information is disclosed (caller ID alone is not identity).
Make agent behavior configurable per firm, including operating hours and after-hours coverage, outbound calling windows by callee type and time zone, escalation rules, and voice selection.
Add guardrails, fallbacks, structured logging, and call/transcript retention designed for audit readiness .
Own production operations end-to-end: latency budgets, monitoring, alerting, failover, and on-call. Treat a law firm’s main phone line as an availability-critical system.
Requirements
Production experience building conversational voice agents integrated with telephony infrastructure such as SIP/RTP , WebRTC , Twilio Media Streams , LiveKit , Deepgram , ElevenLabs , Vapi , Retell , or similar.
Real-time audio pipeline engineering experience with streaming STT and TTS, sub-second response handling, concurrency, and latency profiling under load.
Pipeline engineering for extracting structured JSON or database payloads from live audio streams.
Python service development strength (FastAPI/async or equivalent) and clean REST API design.
Production-grade LLM integration, including function/tool calling, structured outputs, prompt/context engineering, and cost and latency tuning.
Event-driven and asynchronous patterns including queues, background workers, retries, and idempotency.
Systematic evaluation of conversational quality using test suites, transcript review, and regression testing when prompts or models change.
Production ownership experience including containerized deployment, CI/CD , monitoring, structured logging, and personally debugging a live outage.
Technologies
VoIP/SIP, Twilio, Plivo, Amazon Connect, LiveKit
SIP/RTP, WebRTC, Twilio Media Streams
Deepgram, ElevenLabs, Vapi, Retell
STT, TTS, NLU
FastAPI, Python
LLM, JSON, REST API
CI/CD, queues
Benefits
Salary range: USD 120,000 - 160,000 per year
Comprehensive benefits package
401(k) and 401(k) matching
Dental insurance
Flexible spending account
Health insurance and health savings account
Life insurance
Paid time off
Parental leave
Vision insurance
Reports to the CTO; works with the existing AI Architect and AI development team
Location: Remote (US) or Hybrid in Melville, NY
Opportunity to lead high-impact AI work on an established platform with real customers, real data, and unsolved problems in legal tech
Safety, Configuration and Operations
Design caller identification and authentication before disclosing any case information; caller ID alone is not identity.
Configure behavior per firm: operating hours and after-hours coverage, outbound calling windows by callee type and time zone, escalation rules, and voice selection.
Implement guardrails, fallbacks, structured logging, and call/transcript retention suitable for an audit.
Own production service reliability including latency budgets, monitoring, alerting, failover, and on-call support.
Nice to Have
Telephony compliance: state call-recording and consent law, TCPA, permitted calling windows, spam-labeling, and verified-number strategy.
Experience with C#, .NET / ASP.NET and Microsoft SQL Server (core platform), while AI services are Python.
Experience in regulated industries such as legal, medical, insurance, or similar.
Multi-language voice development 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 such as per-minute cost, model selection, and cost-per-call optimization.
Live Data Extraction and Write-Back
Build real-time pipelines to transcribe, parse, and structure conversations into case fields, intake records, case notes, and downstream workflows.
Record and summarize every call into the case file with clear provenance for agent-entered information.
Detect caller language and respond in it, with Spanish prioritized after English.
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