Voice systems engineer (Arabic), a role Altuon hires for
Voice systems engineer (Arabic)
The engineer who knows what the agent says when a caller switches from Levantine to Gulf Arabic mid-sentence, because they tested it before the caller did.
The voice systems engineer builds and runs the telephony, speech and conversation layers of a voice-agent engagement in the Middle East, from carrier integration to the handover to a person. The role owns recognition quality across the Arabic dialects the client's callers actually speak, the policy engine that decides what the agent may resolve, the consent and recording design agreed with the client's compliance function, and the deployment inside the client's own data plane where sovereignty requires it. It is a hands-on role on live telephone numbers: the engineer listens to calls, reads transcripts and changes the system before the next call arrives.
Apply for this role
- Practice
- Voice agents
- Region
- Middle East and North Africa
- Employment
- Full-time employment or a long-term engagement, by agreement.
- Location
- Remote within Jordan or the Gulf, with regular presence at client sites in Amman and the region.
- Working languages
- Arabic and English; French in addition where the engagement requires it.
Responsibilities
- 01Own the telephony layer: carrier integration, trunking, call routing, barge-in and the latency budget from the caller's last word to the agent's first. Design for the conditions of a real line, noise, interruption, a handset held away from the face, rather than for the demonstration room.
- 02Tune speech recognition and synthesis for the Arabic the client's callers speak: Levantine, Gulf and Egyptian alongside Modern Standard Arabic, with a switch into English or French followed rather than refused. Build the dialect test sets from real call material, with consent, and keep them current as the caller population changes.
- 03Design the conversation: the intents, the verification steps, the clarifying questions and the moments the agent must stop. Write the policy engine that decides what the agent may resolve, what it must confirm and what it hands over, so the boundary is enforced in code and legible to the compliance function.
- 04Design consent and recording with the client's legal and compliance functions before the first call is taken: the recording notice, consent capture, retention periods, deletion and the audit trail, read against Jordan's Personal Data Protection Law and the telecommunications rules of the jurisdiction concerned.
- 05Build the handover so that no caller repeats their story. The transcript, the verified identity and the point reached in the policy travel with the call to the person who takes it. Measure how often the handover happens and why, and treat each reason as either a defect to design out or a boundary to keep.
- 06Deploy on the client's premises or inside their data plane where sovereignty demands it, with speech and language models, transcripts and recordings staying where the client's regulator can see them. Own the runbooks and the observability that let the client's own team operate the line after we leave.
- 07Contribute to the practice's evaluation harness, dialect corpora and reference architectures, so that what one line in Amman taught becomes the starting point of the next one in the Gulf.
The first ninety days
The first month is spent on one live line, alongside the practice lead, listening to a hundred recorded calls and reading the evaluation set, the policy engine and the consent design before changing any of them. The aim is to understand why every decision was made, and to find the intents that fail and the dialect the recognition set under-represents.
The second month is the first change owned end to end: a new intent or a recognition improvement, designed, built, run against the dialect test sets and released under the engagement's gates, with the client's service team involved from the design review. By its end the engineer is presenting that work, with call recordings, to the client's head of customer service.
The third month is the first consent and handover design led alone, for a new line or a new phase of an existing one, with the client's compliance function in the room and the practice lead as a reviewer rather than the author. The telephony, the policy engine and the on-premises deployment plan for that line are the engineer's own by the ninetieth day.
What is assessed
- An ear for the line
- A listening exercise: recorded test calls in three Arabic dialects, some of which the agent handled badly. We want to hear what went wrong, whether the fault was recognition, policy or conversation design, and what you would change first.
- Conversation design
- A design exercise for a service line with a stated policy boundary and a caller who does not fit it. We look for a conversation that verifies, resolves what it may and hands over without the caller repeating a word.
- Telephony depth
- A conversation about latency, interruption and audio quality on a real carrier, and a review of code you have written that touched a telephone line. Both are about what breaks at three in the morning.
- Consent and recording literacy
- A discussion of what a recording notice, consent capture and retention design must do under Jordan's Personal Data Protection Law and a Gulf telecommunications regulator. Knowing the obligation matters more than citing the article.
- Clarity with a compliance function
- Explaining why the agent said what it said on a specific call to a non-engineer who is allowed to interrupt. A compliance officer will do this to you; we do it first.
What we look for
- Years of building speech or telephony systems in production, including at least one that answered real calls for a regulated organisation and at least one you had to take off the line.
- Native or near-native Arabic, with a working sense of how Levantine, Gulf and Egyptian speech differ, and the ability to judge a transcript's quality by ear rather than by a score alone.
- Practical knowledge of speech recognition and synthesis models: you can say what a fine-tuned open-weight model does better than a vendor's API, and when the vendor's API is the right choice.
- Evidence that you design for the failure case: a call that went wrong, and what you built so it could not go wrong that way again.
- Comfort in the client's room. The role presents to heads of customer service, compliance officers and, when they ask, the regulator's inspector, and is judged by how well it survives their questions.
- Arabic and English; French in addition is valued.
Current openings
There is no listed opening for this profile at the moment. Applications against it are read year-round.
We hire against these profiles as engagements require. Applications are read year-round.