AI Lead
At Prodigal, we are building AI Agents for loan servicing and collections. Founded in 2018 by IITB alumni, our journey began with one bold mission: to eradicate the inefficiencies and confusion that have plagued the lending and collections industry for decades. We are backed by Y Combinator, Accel and Menlo Ventures.
Today, we stand at the forefront of a seismic shift in the industry, building Agentic AI applications for consumer finance. Powered by our cutting-edge platform, Prodigal’s Intelligence Engine (PIE), we’re creating the next-generation agentic workforce - one that empowers companies to achieve unprecedented levels of operational excellence and intelligence.
With over half a billion consumer finance interactions processed and a growing impact on more than 100 leading companies across North America, we’ve established ourselves as the go-to partner for organizations that demand more from their AI solutions. Our unparalleled experience, coupled with our trusted customer relationships, uniquely positions us to build Agentic AI applications that will revolutionize the future of consumer finance.
At Prodigal, we are driven by a singular, unrelenting purpose: to transform how consumer finance companies engage with their customers and, in turn, drive successful outcomes for all.
About the Role
We're looking for an AI Lead to own the technical direction and team behind proAgent's core intelligence. You'll lead a small, high-agency pod building AI Agents that handle nuanced financial conversations — where every millisecond of latency, every reasoning decision, and every team member's growth matters.
This is a player-coach role with full pod accountability. You'll write code, define the AI architecture, set the technical bar, and directly manage and grow a team of AI engineers. The right person has been in the weeds of voice AI and LLM systems long enough to have strong opinions — and has led teams long enough to know how to bring others along.
What You'll Own
Pod Leadership & Team Building
- Lead and grow the proAgent AI pod — hiring, mentoring, and developing a team of AI engineers who own everything from agent reasoning to voice pipeline optimization.
- Set the technical bar for AI engineering at Prodigal: what rigorous experimentation looks like, what production-readiness means, and how the team should make build-vs-integrate decisions.
- Run sprint cycles, technical reviews, and roadmap planning — keep the pod shipping fast without losing architectural coherence.
- Work directly with the CTO and product leadership to translate company priorities into a pod-level AI roadmap with clear milestones and ownership.
Agent Loop & Reasoning
- Own the architectural direction of the agentic runtime that powers natural, multi-turn conversations while executing complex business logic — payment negotiations, compliance guardrails, objection handling.
- Set the design standards for primitives that balance conversational fluidity with structured reasoning: the agent needs to feel human while making verifiable decisions.
- Define how the pod builds context management systems that track consumer state, conversation history, and business rules across long, branching dialogues.
- Drive the evolution of agent reasoning as model capabilities and product requirements grow — stay ahead of what's possible and what the business needs.
Voice AI Systems
- Own the technical strategy for our real-time voice pipeline — sub-1s latency across transcription, reasoning, and synthesis is a hard requirement, not a goal.
- Set the direction for VAD tuning, turn-taking logic, and the standards that make conversations feel natural at scale.
- Lead evaluation and integration decisions for speech models (STT, TTS, speech-to-speech) as the landscape evolves — we currently work with ElevenLabs and Cartesia for TTS, and Deepgram for STT, and are always exploring what's next.
- Establish engineering practices for debugging and optimizing streaming audio and WebRTC across the pod.
LLM Infrastructure
- Own Prodigal's prompting, orchestration, and model routing strategy — set the standards for the pod.
- Lead the design of evaluation frameworks that measure agent quality beyond accuracy: conversation quality, empathy, compliance adherence, and business outcomes.
- Stay current on model capabilities and make pragmatic build-vs-integrate decisions that balance shipping speed with long-term architectural health.
- Institute red-teaming, adversarial testing, and behavioral evaluation practices before changes reach production.
What You Bring
- 7+ years building production grade engieering systems, with 2+ years leading an AI engineering team or pod with direct reports.
- Proven track record of owning AI product outcomes end-to-end — from problem definition and architecture through production and iteration.
- Hands-on experience with LLMs in production: prompt engineering, orchestration, evaluation, and fine-tuning.
- High bias for action — real-time systems get gnarly fast, and you have a track record of pushing things to production rather than perfecting in isolation
- Strong fundamentals in Python and TypeScript.
- Demonstrated ability to hire and grow strong AI engineers — you know what great looks like and can develop people toward it.
- Clear technical communication — you can explain complex tradeoffs and system behavior to engineers, product managers, and client stakeholders alike.
Even Better
- Deep experience with voice AI: speech recognition, synthesis, telephony systems, and the real-time constraints that come with them.
- Background in fintech, lending, or collections.
- Hands-on experience with Twilio, LiveKit, ElevenLabs, or similar real-time infrastructure.
- You've designed and shipped agentic systems that combine LLM reasoning with structured actions at production scale.
- Track record of building and scaling small, high-performing AI teams from the ground up.
- Experience in instituting evaluation, observability, and red-teaming practices across a team — not just for your own work.
Why This Role
- High leverage: proAgent is poised to handle millions of live consumer conversations every day. Your architectural decisions and the team you build directly determine business outcomes.
- Frontier work: voice AI that reasons, decides, and acts is one of the hardest problems in applied AI — add compliance, empathy, and financial stakes, and it gets harder. We're building it.
- Real ownership: small pod, big scope, full accountability. You will shape what proAgent's intelligence becomes, and the team that builds it.
- Executive partnership: You will work directly with the CTO and the founding leadership. The decisions you make in this role will define Prodigal's AI strategy for years.
From day 1, Prodigal has been defined by talented, humble, and hungry leaders and we want this mindset and culture to continue to blossom from top to bottom in the company. If you have an entrepreneurial spirit and want to work in a fast-paced, intellectually-stimulating environment where you will be pushed to grow, then please reach out because we are looking to build a transformational company that reinvents one of the biggest industries in the US.
To learn more about us - please visit the following:
Our Story - https://www.prodigaltech.com/our-story
What shapes our thinking - https://link.prodigaltech.com/our-thesis