Founding AI Engineer

About Eklan

We are building the communication-performance infrastructure for the multilingual global workforce

Everyday, millions of highly skilled professionals are underestimated—not because they lack expertise, but because language can prevent them from demonstrating it clearly under pressure. Eklan gives professionals a realistic environment to practise the conversations their jobs demand, receive precise feedback, and improve before the real moment arrives.

We are beginning with healthcare, where communication directly affects patient safety, professional trust and career progression. Our long-term vision extends across every communication-critical industry.

We are looking for an exceptional Founding AI Engineer to help build the technical foundation required to deliver this vision at global scale.

About the Role

You will work directly with the founder to design, build and scale Eklan’s core AI platform.

This is not a narrow model-integration role. You will influence our architecture, product, AI systems, engineering culture and technical strategy. You will move between understanding customers, prototyping new experiences, evaluating model performance and building reliable production infrastructure.

You will have significant ownership from the beginning and the opportunity to shape both the product and the company.

What you will build

You will help us create:

• Real-time, voice-based AI simulations that respond naturally to learners
• Role-, industry- and situation-specific AI characters
• Adaptive simulations that change based on a learner’s decisions and communication
• Performance-evaluation systems that assess clarity, response latency, completeness, terminology and professional judgment
• Personalized practice experiences generated from each learner’s weaknesses
• Reliable speech-to-text, text-to-speech and conversational-AI pipelines
• Evaluation frameworks for measuring simulation quality, safety and learning outcomes
• Multi-tenant infrastructure for individuals, employers and training organizations
• Analytics that show individual and organizational performance over time
• Secure, observable and cost-efficient infrastructure capable of supporting global usage

What you will do

• Own major technical decisions across AI, backend, infrastructure and product architecture
• Build and deploy production-grade generative-AI systems
• Design orchestration, memory, retrieval and evaluation systems for dynamic simulations
• Improve conversational realism, response quality and voice latency
• Create systems for testing, monitoring and mitigating hallucinations and inconsistent model behaviour
• Establish engineering standards for reliability, security, privacy, testing and observability
• Make thoughtful build-versus-buy decisions across models, voice providers and infrastructure
• Work directly with learners and industry experts to translate real workflows into effective simulations
• Recruit and mentor future members of Eklan’s engineering team
• Help define Eklan’s long-term technical roadmap and defensibility

What we are looking for

You may be a strong fit if you:

• Have built and operated production software systems used by real customers
• Have strong backend and systems-engineering fundamentals
• Have hands-on experience building products with large language models
• Understand model orchestration, structured outputs, retrieval, tool use and AI evaluation
• Can work with real-time audio, speech recognition or voice-generation systems—or are excited to master them quickly
• Are proficient in Python and comfortable working across a modern product stack
• Understand cloud infrastructure, databases, APIs, queues, caching and distributed systems
• Can balance rapid experimentation with long-term architectural quality
• Communicate clearly about technical decisions, constraints and trade-offs
• Are comfortable operating with ambiguity and taking responsibility beyond a conventional engineering job description
• Care deeply about customers and the real-world consequences of the systems you build

Experience with healthcare, learning technology or multilingual products is valuable, but not required.

Especially valuable experience

We would be particularly interested if you have worked on one or more of the following:

• Real-time conversational or voice AI
• LLM evaluation and observability
• Agentic systems and workflow orchestration
• Low-latency distributed systems
• Personalized or ada…