AI Voice Engineer

About Freight Hero:The freight brokerage industry has exploded in recent years, growing from a mere 6% to over 20% of US truck freight in just a decade, now valued at $21 billion. Freight brokers typically allocate up to 90% of their time to operational back-office tasks, leaving only 10% for revenue-generating activities (depending on the business model). By combining AI with human oversight, we can streamline these back-office processes, driving significant operational efficiencies. The industry's profit margins have recently contracted from 20% to 5%, underscoring the critical need for cost reduction. We believe that the perfect storm of industry challenges and AI maturity presents a venture scale opportunity to revolutionize the freight brokerage sector and the broader freight/supply chain industry.
Freight Hero is funded and supported by AI Fund based in Palo Alto, California. AI Fund is a team of diligent innovators who build great companies that move humanity forward by accelerating the adoption of AI. Founded by Dr. Andrew Ng, AI Fund is a startup studio focused on resolving problems to move the world forward. We build new AI companies to bridge AI technology and critical applications. Just as electricity transformed numerous industries, AI and AI Fund are poised to do the same. 
What We Seek:We are looking for a AI Voice Engineer to lead the development and evolution of Freight Hero’s voice automation capabilities. You will work directly with the CEO to design a strategic roadmap for integrating voice AI into our platform—empowering human agents, automating communication-heavy workflows, and enhancing operational efficiency across the freight brokerage lifecycle. As the owner of our voice AI stack, you will make critical architectural decisions, experiment with cutting-edge tools, and iteratively improve our agentic voice systems for real-world logistics execution.

What You Will Be Doing:

• Own the Voice AI Stack – Lead architecture, development, and continual refinement of Freight Hero’s voice AI capabilities, including speech recognition, synthesis, and real-time dialogue management tailored to freight operations.
• Define the Strategic Vision – Establish the long-term roadmap for how voice AI can augment or automate broker workflows, from phone-based load confirmations to automated check calls and appointment scheduling.
• Build Agentic Voice Workflows – Design multi-turn, task-oriented voice agents using LLMs, fine-tuned models, and open-source ASR/TTS systems to handle high-volume interactions with shippers, carriers, and internal teams.
• Prototype, Validate, and Iterate – Rapidly develop MVPs, conduct real-world pilots, gather feedback, and fine-tune models and flows for naturalness, reliability, and compliance with industry norms.
• Optimize for Human-in-the-Loop Performance– Design voice workflows that integrate seamlessly with Freight Hero’s augmented ops team, empowering human agents while offloading repetitive voice tasks.
• Integrate with the Freight Ecosystem – Ensure your voice systems communicate effectively with TMS platforms, VOIP systems, CRMs, and broker ops tools, creating a seamless data and workflow layer.
• Build for Scale and Resilience – Architect scalable, cloud-native infrastructure that can handle concurrent voice sessions, asynchronous callbacks, and error recovery in real time.
• Collaborate Cross-Functionally – Work alongside ops, product, and engineering to align voice AI capabilities with business goals, SLA requirements, and user experience priorities.
• Stay Ahead of the Curve – Constantly evaluate advancements in speech AI, LLM tooling, and telephony infrastructure to keep Freight Hero on the cutting edge.

What You Must Bring:

• English Proficiency- Strong written and verbal English communication skills required.
• LLM & Agentic Workflow Experience – Deep understanding of agentic workflow orchestration, prompt engineering, memory handling, and multi-turn conversation design using open-source or commercial stacks.
• Product Ownership Mindset – Ability to define what to build and why, balancing technical feasibility with operational impact and end-user delight.
• Startup Grit – Experience building from scratch in early-stage or high-velocity environments; you’re comfortable wearing multiple hats and moving fast.
• System Design & Infrastructure – Proficient in designing scalable voice systems that integrate securely with cloud platforms, telephony APIs (e.g. Twilio, Aircall), and internal ops tools.
• Human-Centric Automation – Passion for blending AI with human judgment—designing systems that enhance rather than replace frontline workers.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration – Strong communication skills and a bias toward action when aligning with business stakeholders and operations teams.

Nice To Haves Include:

• AI Voice Expertise- Hands-on experience with ASR (e.g. Whisper, Deepgram), TTS (e.g. ElevenLabs, Azure), and building production-grade voicebots or virtual agents.
• Freight/Logistics Domain Familiarity (Nice to Have)  – Prior experience or demonstrated interest in freight, logistics, or back-office automation.

Characteristics We Value:

• Accountability: an obligation or willingness to accept responsibility or to account for one's actions while doing so with the highest regard for integrity  
• Leadership: able to influence others to follow you and lead the team to a brighter future 
• Grit: able to stick with projects and work hard through good and bad times. High pain tolerance and can perform well under stress or pressure
• Scrappy: Takes initiative and proactively gets things done with low resources, but doing creative things, begging, borrowing, and whatever is needed in an ambiguous environment or situation
• Ownership Orientation: Demonstrated orientation of extreme ownership over all aspects of the company and extremely results-driven in nature

We are committed to providing an environment of mutual respect where equal employment opportunities are available to all applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, pregnancy (including childbirth, lactation and related medical conditions), national origin, age, physical and mental disability, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, genetic information (including characteristics and testing), military and veteran status, and any other characteristic protected by applicable law. We believes that diversity and inclusion among our employees is critical to our success as a company, and we seek to recruit, develop and retain the most talented people from a diverse candidate pool. Selection for employment is decided on the basis of qualifications, merit, and business need.