Founding AI Engineer

About Eklan

We are building the communication-performance infrastructure for the multilingual global workforce

Everyday, millions of highly skilled professionals are underestimated—not because they lack expertise, but because language can prevent them from demonstrating it clearly under pressure. Eklan gives professionals a realistic environment to practise the conversations their jobs demand, receive precise feedback, and improve before the real moment arrives.

We are beginning with healthcare, where communication directly affects patient safety, professional trust and career progression. Our long-term vision extends across every communication-critical industry.

We are looking for an exceptional Founding AI Engineer to help build the technical foundation required to deliver this vision at global scale.

About the Role

You will work directly with the founder to design, build and scale Eklan’s core AI platform.

This is not a narrow model-integration role. You will influence our architecture, product, AI systems, engineering culture and technical strategy. You will move between understanding customers, prototyping new experiences, evaluating model performance and building reliable production infrastructure.

You will have significant ownership from the beginning and the opportunity to shape both the product and the company.

What you will build

You will help us create:

Real-time, voice-based AI simulations that respond naturally to learners
Role-, industry- and situation-specific AI characters
Adaptive simulations that change based on a learner’s decisions and communication
Performance-evaluation systems that assess clarity, response latency, completeness, terminology and professional judgment
Personalized practice experiences generated from each learner’s weaknesses
Reliable speech-to-text, text-to-speech and conversational-AI pipelines
Evaluation frameworks for measuring simulation quality, safety and learning outcomes
Multi-tenant infrastructure for individuals, employers and training organizations
Analytics that show individual and organizational performance over time
Secure, observable and cost-efficient infrastructure capable of supporting global usage
What you will do

Own major technical decisions across AI, backend, infrastructure and product architecture
Build and deploy production-grade generative-AI systems
Design orchestration, memory, retrieval and evaluation systems for dynamic simulations
Improve conversational realism, response quality and voice latency
Create systems for testing, monitoring and mitigating hallucinations and inconsistent model behaviour
Establish engineering standards for reliability, security, privacy, testing and observability
Make thoughtful build-versus-buy decisions across models, voice providers and infrastructure
Work directly with learners and industry experts to translate real workflows into effective simulations
Recruit and mentor future members of Eklan’s engineering team
Help define Eklan’s long-term technical roadmap and defensibility
What we are looking for

You may be a strong fit if you:

Have built and operated production software systems used by real customers
Have strong backend and systems-engineering fundamentals
Have hands-on experience building products with large language models
Understand model orchestration, structured outputs, retrieval, tool use and AI evaluation
Can work with real-time audio, speech recognition or voice-generation systems—or are excited to master them quickly
Are proficient in Python and comfortable working across a modern product stack
Understand cloud infrastructure, databases, APIs, queues, caching and distributed systems
Can balance rapid experimentation with long-term architectural quality
Communicate clearly about technical decisions, constraints and trade-offs
Are comfortable operating with ambiguity and taking responsibility beyond a conventional engineering job description
Care deeply about customers and the real-world consequences of the systems you build
Experience with healthcare, learning technology or multilingual products is valuable, but not required.

Especially valuable experience

We would be particularly interested if you have worked on one or more of the following:

Real-time conversational or voice AI
LLM evaluation and observability
Agentic systems and workflow orchestration
Low-latency distributed systems
Personalized or adaptive learning systems
Healthcare, enterprise or regulated software
Speech, pronunciation or linguistic analysis
Multi-tenant SaaS infrastructure
Human-in-the-loop AI systems
Scaling an early-stage product from prototype to significant usage
What matters more than credentials

We care less about prestigious titles and more about evidence of exceptional ability.

Show us systems you have built, difficult technical problems you have solved, open-source contributions, research you have translated into products or projects that demonstrate unusual curiosity and ownership.

You do not need to satisfy every requirement. We are looking for a builder who learns quickly, reasons from first principles and consistently turns ambitious ideas into reliable products.

*Why join Eklan
*

1. Founding-level ownership

You will help determine what we build, how we build it and the engineering culture we establish.

1. A technically ambitious problem

Eklan sits at the intersection of voice AI, adaptive simulation, performance evaluation, personalization and industry-specific intelligence.

1. Direct customer impact

You will see professionals use what you build to become safer, more confident and more effective at work.

1. A meaningful global mission

Expertise is globally distributed, but the ability to demonstrate it confidently across languages is not. We want to change that.

1. Meaningful equity

As an early technical leader, you will have genuine ownership in the value you help create.

What success could look like

Within your first 12 months, you will have:

Helped establish Eklan’s scalable technical architecture
Shipped major improvements to our real-time simulation experience
Built evaluation systems that make AI performance measurable
Improved platform reliability, latency and unit economics
Developed reusable infrastructure for launching new professions and industries
Helped recruit the first members of a world-class engineering organization
How to apply

Send us the following:

Your résumé or personal website
Introduce us to a topic that interests you and explain why (Max. 150 words)
Links to relevant projects, code, research or writing
Please do not send a generic cover letter. We would rather learn what you have built, how you think and why you want to build Eklan with us.

Benefits: Flexible schedule
Location: Toronto, ON