Lead Engineer

Role Description

We're looking for a Lead Engineer to drive the next phase of Canary's Voice AI product — the platform that handles guest calls for hotels end-to-end, from reservations and modifications to service requests and intelligent transfers. You'll own the architecture of a real-time, telephony-grounded system. You'll lead a pod of engineers, set the bar as a hands-on IC, and partner closely with Product to ship voice experiences that operate reliably at scale across major hospitality brands. The systems you design will speak directly to guests, so passion and discipline around quality, latency, and operational excellence are essential.

Responsibilities

• Directly manage a pod of engineers responsible for Canary's Voice AI product, including inbound call handling, reservation booking and modification flows, service request creation, and intelligent call transfer.
• Set an example as an IC in terms of both the quality and velocity of code that you ship.
• Own the architecture and its evolution across telephony integrations (Twilio, Bandwidth, etc), real-time AI components (Deepgram, ElevenLabs, OpenAI), and integration points with PMS Gateway, CRS Gateway, and the Ticket Gateway.
• Drive measurable improvements in call containment, transfer quality, latency, and cost-per-call by deeply understanding metrics and how hotels and guests use the product.
• Partner closely with Product Managers to inform roadmap and prioritization, with a strong voice on product decisions for the Voice AI surface area.
• Independently mentor and advise engineers in the pod, and build engineering execution plans, break down work, and assign it across the team.
• Run pod processes autonomously and escalate appropriately when required.
• Participate in hiring and interviewing for the Voice AI team and broader engineering org.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of a strong engineering background.
• 2+ years of proven experience of leading successful engineering teams.
• Solid knowledge of developing backend applications.
• Hands-on experience building real-time or streaming systems — voice, audio, video, or low-latency event-driven services.
• Have a strong demonstrated ability to ship high-quality products that operate reliably at scale.
• Self-motivated, collaborative, and diligent work ethic.
• Excellent communication skills. You love being part of a diverse team, building consensus, and establishing credibility. You are a Class-A communicator: curious, thoughtful, clear, and (mostly) correct.
• Comfort with ambiguity and is eager to embrace ownership and accountability.
• Bonus: Experience with conversational AI, LLM agent frameworks (e.g. LiveKit Agents, Pipecat), telephony (Twilio, SIP), ASR/TTS providers (Deepgram, ElevenLabs, Cartesia), or evaluations/testing harnesses for agentic systems.

Benefits

• Canary Days: Each month we provide company-wide days off to ensure there is at least one extended weekend or day off.
• Self Improvement Club: We meet each month and share our personal goals for the month. Each individual is provided a budget towards any purchases that help us achieve these goals.
• Professional Development Chats: We provide budget to help drive cross-functional professional development conversations across the organization.
• Travel Reimbursement: Team members are able to visit our offices across New York, San Francisco or Dallas when they choose, and are provided a travel stipend for doing so.
• Personal Travel Reimbursement: If you stay at a hotel that Canary works with, we provide a credit towards your stay.