Voice AI Developers

United Airlines is seeking Voice AI Developers for a hybrid contract role in Chicago, Illinois, focused on building voice-enabled AI agents to support customer service and retail automation. This is a six-month engagement requiring hands-on senior development expertise in conversational AI, cloud infrastructure, and production software delivery.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and deploy voice AI agents and agentic workflows using Python and LangChain, LangGraph, or comparable frameworks.
• Build conversational workflows that manage customer intent, multi-turn context, tool execution, business rules, fallback behavior, and handoff to a live representative.
• Integrate speech recognition, speech synthesis, streaming interfaces, and contact center platforms; optimize response latency, turn-taking, interruption handling, and recovery from recognition errors.
• Develop secure APIs and backend integrations that enable AI agents to retrieve information and execute approved customer service and retail transactions.
• Implement and optimize prompts, agent orchestration, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and grounding against approved enterprise knowledge sources.
• Build resilient, scalable AWS solutions with appropriate timeout, retry, error-handling, and asynchronous processing patterns.
• Write clean, maintainable code; participate in design and code reviews; and contribute to technical specifications and architectural decisions.
• Develop unit, integration, and conversational regression tests; support end-to-end, performance, and non-functional testing.
• Evaluate conversation quality, task completion, response accuracy, latency, and failure scenarios; use findings to improve reliability and customer experience.
• Implement security, customer data protection, responsible AI guardrails, and controls against unsupported responses or unauthorized actions.
• Estimate work for sprint and release planning, communicate dependencies and risks, and deliver assigned capabilities on time and to agreed quality standards.
• Prepare and release software through non-production and production environments using CI/CD pipelines; support deployment validation and post-release monitoring.
• Troubleshoot production issues, identify root causes, implement fixes, and document operational procedures and support handoffs.
• Collaborate with employees, vendor contractors, product teams, and business stakeholders in an Agile delivery environment.

Qualifications

• Required
• Python development: Production-quality backend services, asynchronous programming, object-oriented design, and automated testing.
• Conversational and voice AI: LLM-powered voice agents, speech-to-text and text-to-speech integration, real-time conversation flows, and voice experience optimization.
• AI agent development and orchestration: LangChain, LangGraph, or comparable frameworks; tool calling, prompt engineering, conversation state management, and RAG.
• AWS cloud development: Scalable deployment, serverless and container-based services, monitoring, and production troubleshooting.
• API integration and software design: REST APIs, microservices, event-driven patterns, and relational, NoSQL, and vector databases.