Checkmate is hiring a Principal Engineer - Voice AI to provide technical leadership and architectural vision for our next-generation agentic Voice AI platform. You will define the engineering design and operational rigor behind the systems powering real-time drive-thru automation at scale, bringing together advanced AI with meaningful business impact.
What You'll Do
- Provide directional leadership in the voice ordering system’s agentic system design, architecture, and orchestration strategies.
- Work directly with the VP of Machine Learning, CTO, and CEO to solve and roadmap business-critical implementations into the voice application.
- Build and maintain enterprise-grade Python based systems that integrate LLM and Generative AI frameworks to support our end-to-end AI product pipeline.
- Design CI/CD pipelines for orchestrated LLM-driven agentic services and manage deployments across cloud environments that power production drive-thru operations.
- Own custom model testing, monitoring, and maintenance to ensure reliability throughout the full ML model life cycle.
- Design prototypes and POCs that demonstrate feasibility, validate approach, and support product direction for the Voice AI platform.
- Research, design, and train LLM applications aimed at solving real operational challenges inside restaurant environments.
- Work with internal teams and external partners to provide technical guidance on adopting and integrating LLM capabilities.
What We're Looking For
- Bachelor’s Degree in Statistics, Applied Mathematics, Computer Science, or a related technical field.
- At least 10 years of hands-on Python experience and 8 years building and maintaining scalable API based services.
- 5 years working with LLM or GenAI technologies including OpenAI API, ChatGPT, GPT-4, Bard, Synthesia, Pydantic AI, HuggingFace Transformers, PyTorch, or similar.
- 4 years of agentic process development and iteration life-cycle experience.
- At least 6 years of experience with AWS, GCP, or Azure, and 6 years of MLOps, CI/CD work, containerization, and deploying models in test and production environments.
- Strong communication skills with the ability to explain LLM capabilities and limitations to non-technical stakeholders.
Nice to Have
- Masters of Science in a relevant field.
- 13 years of combined professional experience with NLP tools and LLMs.
- 10 years of experience using NLP tools such as NLTK, CoreNLP, and word or sentence embeddings such as word2vec.
- Expert in Python, LoRA/QLoRA fine-tuning, classifiers, and ASR’s.
- Deep domain knowledge with an emphasis on tools in NLP or LLM applications.
- Strong understanding of Responsible AI standards and protocols.
- Applied research or prototyping experience building LLM driven systems and knowledge of best practices for production LLM development.
Technical Stack
- Languages & Frameworks: Python, PyTorch, HuggingFace Transformers, Pydantic AI
- AI/ML Technologies: LLM, Generative AI, OpenAI API, ChatGPT, GPT-4, Bard, Synthesia, NLTK, CoreNLP, word2vec, LoRA, QLoRA, ASR
- Infrastructure & Ops: AWS, GCP, Azure, MLOps, CI/CD
Team & Environment
You will partner closely with executive leadership, including the VP of Machine Learning, CTO, and CEO. Join us at this pivotal moment of growth to shape AI products used daily by thousands of staff and customers.
Checkmate is an equal opportunity employer.
