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 t ... (truncated, view full listing at source)