CollectWise — AI Agent Engineer

Type: Full-time | On-site | Manhattan, NY Compensation: $200,000–$300,000 + 0.25%–1% equity Hiring count: 1 Visa sponsorship: None available Reports to: Sean, Founder & CEO (no LinkedIn provided)

CollectWise is a YC-backed, seed-stage startup using generative AI to automate consumer debt collection, a $35B market in the US alone. Its AI agents handle the full late-stage recovery process — asset research, pre-legal outreach, litigation, credit reporting, and enforcement actions like garnishments and liens — and are already outperforming human collectors 2x at a fraction of the cost, running 10M+ calls per month.

Founded: 2024 | Team size: ~5 (Seed, 1–10) | Total funding: Not disclosed (YC-backed) Industry: AI Tools Website: collectwise.com Office: Manhattan, NY

• Own it end-to-end: Build the voice AI infrastructure in-house from scratch on LiveKit and own the full stack — orchestration, prompting strategy, evaluation.
• Real scale, real outcomes: Millions of consumer interactions per month; the work ties directly to liquidation, containment, and conversion metrics, not just engineering metrics.
• Fast traction: $2M annualized run rate in a few months with a team of five, targeting $10M ARR this year.

An intake video is present on the Contrario role page, but no transcript or written intake summary is included in the source HTML. Not fabricated — capture from the intake video separately if needed.

CollectWise needs an AI Agent Engineer to build and own its voice AI agent infrastructure end-to-end on LiveKit — the orchestration layer, the prompting strategy across millions of consumer interactions, and continuous performance improvement through rigorous testing and iteration. Equally suited to a deep voice AI engineer or a strong, analytical, business-minded infrastructure engineer.

• →Build CollectWise's voice AI infrastructure on LiveKit from the ground up
• →Design and own the architecture of real-time voice agent systems: orchestration, state management, latency optimization, prompting, and reliability
• →Own the end-to-end prompting strategy: conversation flows, tone, compliance-safe phrasing, guardrails, and edge-case handling
• →Build and maintain testing and evaluation frameworks: A/B testing, regression testing, conversation QA, benchmarking, and KPI reporting
• →Write, expand, and continuously improve AI prompting to cover more real-world debt collection scenarios
• →Iterate on performance data, call outcomes, and customer feedback to improve containment, conversion, liquidation rates, and customer satisfaction
• →Optimize ASR, STT, TTS, turn-taking, interruption handling, and state transitions to improve voice quality
• →Build scalable systems and tooling to support millions of voice interactions
• →Migrate client implementations from legacy voice AI infrastructure to the latest systems while preserving client-specific customizations
• →Work closely with product, operations, and leadership to translate business goals into high-performing voice agent behavior

Tech stack: LiveKit, Node.js, AWS, SQL; ASR/STT/TTS, real-time audio pipelines, SIP/telephony

• 2+ years of experience in voice AI, conversational AI, prompt engineering, speech systems, or related agentic workflows
• 3+ years of experience in platform, infrastructure, or backend engineering
• Strong experience with Node.js, AWS, and SQL
• Experience building and shipping production systems in a startup or similarly fast-paced environment
• Experience with voice orchestration platforms or agent frameworks such as LiveKit or equivalent
• Strong prompt writing instincts and ability to design clear, effective, and resilient conversational flows for real-world edge cases
• Strong analytical skills and comfort tying technical work directly to business outcomes and ROI

• Voice AI experience in production, even from a no-name company or non-prestigious background.
• Has built AI infrastructure or agentic systems at a startup or AI company, understands what production-grade means at real scale
• LiveKit experience or direct experience with voice orchestration frameworks
• Business-minded, can connect technical decisions to liquidation rates, containment rates, and conversion metrics, not just engineering metrics
• Strong prompt engineering instincts, has designed conversational flows that handle edge cases gracefully under compliance constraints
• Infrastructure depth in Node.js, AWS, and SQL in a startup-paced environment where they owned what they built
• Experience with telephony infrastructure such as SIP trunking is a strong additional signal

• Pure academic or research background with no production deployment experience
• No analytical instincts, builds technically but cannot connect the work to business outcomes and ROI
• English communication skills not at native or near-native level. This is a hard filter due to the prompt engineering and compliance-sensitive consumer communication component
• Not willing to be in-person in Manhattan 4 to 5 days per week
• No experience with real-time systems or low-latency infrastructure

• Experience — 3–10 years
• Salary — $200,000–$300,000
• Equity — 0%–1% (Job Details); outreach template quotes 0.25%–1%
• On-site policy — In-person, Manhattan 4–5 days/week
• Visa sponsorship — None available
• Employment type — Full-time
• Location — Manhattan, NY

No screening questions section in the source HTML. Not fabricated.

Stage 1 — Pending Approval — Candidates awaiting initial approval. Stage 2 — Initial Call w/ Founder & CEO — First call with Sean. Stage 3 — Take-home Assignment Stage 4 — Technical Interview Stage 5 — Offer Extended Stage 6 — Hired — Candidate accepts and starts.