Lead AI Engineer İş İlanı

We are supporting the recruitment process for a technology startup operating in the Physical AI and offline retail technology space. The company develops autonomous robots and kiosks deployed in supermarkets, malls, and airports, with a strong focus on real-time AI, Voice AI, retail media, and data-driven customer experiences. They are looking for a Lead AI Engineer who will take end-to-end ownership of the AI systems behind these products and work closely with the CTO and founding team. This is a hands-on engineering role with direct ownership of systems running in real-world production environments. Responsibilities Improve real-time speech recognition in noisy and echo-heavy environments, optimizing accuracy, latency, and reliability across models and providers Develop and enhance RAG and retrieval systems over structured and unstructured data Own and improve the end-to-end speech-to-speech pipeline while managing latency, cost, quality, and reliability Investigate production AI failures, identify root causes, and drive measurable improvements Build evaluation sets, benchmarks, and experiments to continuously improve system performance Bring AI systems from raw data to reliable production when onboarding new locations Evaluate new LLMs, ASR/TTS providers, agent frameworks, and infrastructure, and adopt them when they meaningfully improve the product Qualifications Minimum 6 years of professional experience Degree in Computer Science or a related engineering field Strong Python and backend engineering fundamentals Experience building and operating production software Hands-on production experience with LLM applications and RAG systems Ability to diagnose production issues across models, retrieval, prompting, data, and infrastructure Experience working with structured data models Strong quantitative approach to latency, cost, quality, and reliability Experience in at least one of ASR, TTS, VAD, or real-time audio Experience with streaming or low-latency systems Experience with search or information retrieval systems Experience with GCP or similar cloud infrastructure Regular use of AI-assisted / agentic coding tools such as Claude Code, Codex, or similar Full-stack engineering experience What They Offer Competitive compensation Equity participation in a fast-growing startup Flexible working model: remote / hybrid in Istanbul Opportunity to work on AI systems deployed on robots and kiosks in real-world environments High ownership and direct access to the CTO and founders Access to modern AI and agentic coding tools