Senior AI Engineer / Team Lead

7 Kings Code is looking for a Senior AI Engineer / Developer – Team Lead to drive the technical development of its AI Sale Agent, an AI-powered voice sales platform serving paying customers. This hands-on leadership role involves spending 60–70% of the time coding, reviewing code, and managing production development. The successful candidate will lead a small team of junior AI engineers, oversee AI architecture, troubleshoot production issues, and collaborate closely with the CTO and cross-functional teams to deliver scalable, reliable, and production-ready AI solutions. The position is full-time, on-site at DHA Phase 8, Lahore, Pakistan, with working hours from 5:30 pm to 2:30 am to align with US business hours.

Key Responsibilities
- Design, develop, and maintain large language model (LLM)-powered conversational AI systems, including prompt engineering, tool calling, context management, guardrails, and fallback mechanisms.
- Build and optimize real-time voice AI pipelines covering speech-to-text, LLM inference, text-to-speech, latency reduction, interruption handling, and call quality improvements.
- Lead product development by translating requirements into engineering tasks and delivering roadmap initiatives.
- Develop and maintain REST APIs, webhooks, and integrations with CRM and telephony platforms such as HubSpot, Salesforce, GoHighLevel, Twilio, and RingCentral.
- Investigate and resolve production issues, handle customer escalations, perform root cause analysis, and implement long-term fixes.
- Conduct code reviews, establish engineering standards, and implement automated testing and AI-agent evaluation processes.
- Mentor and manage two junior AI engineers by assigning tasks, reviewing their work, and supporting their growth.
- Develop AI and automation solutions for clients while focusing primarily on the core AI Sale Agent product.
- Monitor AI infrastructure, model performance, scalability, and per-call costs.
- Maintain technical documentation, deployment procedures, and troubleshooting guides.
- Collaborate effectively with Product, Infrastructure, Business Intelligence, Sales, Customer Success teams, and the CTO.

Required Qualifications
- Minimum 5 years of professional software engineering experience.
- At least 3 years of hands-on AI/ML application development experience.
- Recent experience building and deploying production LLM-based applications.
- Proven track record supporting live production systems used by paying customers.
- At least 1 year of technical leadership experience, including mentoring or code reviews.
- Advanced Python programming and backend development skills.
- Experience with REST APIs, webhooks, third-party integrations, and database systems.
- Practical knowledge of LLM integration, prompt engineering, tool calling, and context management.
- Familiarity with PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, or similar databases.
- Experience working with cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure, and containerization tools like Docker.
- Proficient with Git, branching strategies, code reviews, and production debugging.
- Experience with WebSockets, streaming, or event-driven systems.
- Strong understanding of software testing, deployment, and production reliability.
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Data Science, or related field (equivalent production experience considered).
- Valid CNIC and legal authorization to work in Pakistan.
- Availability to work on-site in Lahore during the designated US business-hour shift.
- Strong spoken and written English communication skills with the ability to engage US-based stakeholders.
- Willingness to complete a practical coding/AI design assessment and live technical interview.

Preferred Qualifications and Benefits
- Experience with Voice AI, conversational AI, or real-time audio systems.
- Familiarity with telephony platforms such as Twilio, RingCentral, SIP, Asterisk, or dialers.
- Knowledge of speech technologies like Deepgram, Whisper, ElevenLabs, or Azure Speech.
- Understanding of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), embeddings, and vector databases such as Pinecone, Weaviate, pgvector, or FAISS.
- Experience with AI evaluation tools such as LangSmith or Langfuse.
- Skills in Node.js, TypeScript, CI/CD pipelines, Kubernetes, Terraform, monitoring, or alerting.
- Experience integrating CRM and sales technology platforms.
- Background in building early-stage products, working with US clients, or mentoring junior engineers.
- Awareness of call-recording consent, AI disclosure, and telemarketing regulations.

What Success Looks Like
Success in this role means delivering product features predictably while maintaining production reliability, improving AI call quality and scalability, establishing robust code-review and testing processes, resolving customer escalations through root-cause analysis, mentoring junior engineers to become independent contributors, and maintaining clear technical documentation alongside monitoring AI operating costs.

Career Growth
This position offers a clear career path toward Engineering Manager or Head of AI Engineering as the AI Sale Agent product and engineering team expand.

Compensation
Monthly salary ranges from Rs100,000 to Rs170,000.

Work Location
This is an on-site role based in Lahore, Pakistan, requiring availability during the specified US business-hour shift.