Senior Python Edge AI Developer

Location: Remote EUROPE (working with UK & Polish team)

Type: Full-time Contract (initial 3 months leading to longer engagement)

About the Role:

Were building a hotel voice-assistant product that brings together Python services on-device AI inference speech and audio processing touchscreen interfaces connected hardware and cloud messaging all running on physical devices deployed in real hotel rooms.

Were looking for a pragmatic full-stack product engineer whos comfortable working across this range of disciplines and can turn evolving product requirements into software thats reliable maintainable and genuinely runs well on real hardware not just in a dev environment.

This is a hands-on role at an early-stage fast-moving hardware startup. Youll be working close to the metal literally diagnosing issues that span application code the OS networking and connected devices while also shaping the architecture of a product thats still evolving.

What Youll Be Doing:

• Designing and building production Python services and APIs (FastAPI HTTP event-driven/message-based communication) that power the Jasper voice assistant.
• Integrating AI and ML capabilities into a real shipping product model APIs local inference engines and agent/tool-calling workflows.
• Building resilient integrations with external services handling timeouts failures retries and async responses gracefully.
• Working with PostgreSQL and SQLAlchemy (or comparable tools) to design and maintain data-access layers.
• Developing and troubleshooting on Linux including services processes permissions networking logs and hardware-connected applications.
• Building and maintaining Docker-based packaging and deployment workflows.
• Writing automated tests and using code-quality tooling (pytest static type checking linting) to keep the codebase maintainable as it grows.
• Diagnosing issues across the full stack application OS configuration networking and connected hardware.
• Collaborating via Git in a team workflow including reviewing and improving colleagues code.
• Working closely with product hardware and operations colleagues to turn real-world requirements into robust technical solutions.

Essential Experience:

• Strong commercial experience developing production applications in Python with a good understanding of typing asynchronous programming dependency management and maintainable code structure.
• Experience designing and integrating APIs and distributed services ideally using FastAPI HTTP and event-driven or message-based communication.
• Proven ability to integrate AI or machine-learning capabilities into real products including working with model APIs local inference engines or agent and tool-calling workflows.
• Experience building reliable applications that interact with external services and handle timeouts failures retries and asynchronous responses gracefully.
• Good understanding of software architecture principles such as separation of concerns dependency inversion domain modelling and testable component design.
• Experience with relational databases and data-access layers; comfortable working with PostgreSQL and SQLAlchemy or comparable technologies.
• Strong Linux development and troubleshooting skills including services processes permissions networking logs and hardware-connected applications.
• Practical experience with Docker and repeatable build packaging or deployment workflows.
• Experience writing automated tests and using code-quality tooling such as pytest static type checking and linting.
• Comfortable diagnosing problems across the full system including application code networking operating-system configuration and connected hardware.
• Experience using Git within a collaborative development workflow including reviewing and improving other developers code.
• Able to work effectively in an evolving product environment turning user and operational requirements into robust technical solutions.
• Clear written and verbal communication skills with the ability to explain technical decisions and collaborate with product hardware and operational colleagues.

Nice to Have:

• Experience deploying software to NVIDIA Jetson ARM64 or other resource-constrained edge-computing platforms.
• Experience with speech technology including speech-to-text text-to-speech voice-activity detection wake-word detection or real-time audio processing.
• Familiarity with local language-model inference and orchestration technologies such as Ollama LangChain LangGraph or .
• Experience with retrieval-augmented generation embeddings semantic search and vector databases such as pgvector.
• Familiarity with the Model Context Protocol and building tools or integrations for AI agents.
• Experience with MQTT AWS IoT Core or similar device-to-cloud messaging platforms.
• Experience building desktop or touchscreen interfaces using Qt or PySide.
• Knowledge of audio devices and Linux audio systems such as PulseAudio microphone arrays noise suppression or acoustic echo cancellation.
• Experience integrating Bluetooth and Wi-Fi provisioning on Linux including BlueZ or D-Bus.
• C or C experience particularly for performance-sensitive embedded or hardware-adjacent components.
• Experience packaging Linux applications as Debian packages and managing them with systemd.
• Familiarity with cross-compilation QEMU or multi-architecture Docker builds.
• Experience with ONNX Runtime Faster Whisper Kokoro or comparable optimised inference frameworks.
• Knowledge of conversational-AI design prompt engineering tool selection and safe handling of model-generated output.
• Experience designing technology for hospitality smart-room IoT or other customer-facing physical environments.
• Familiarity with observability and remote fleet support including structured logging Sentry and secure remote diagnostics.

Note on Requirements:

Jetson experience speech processing and familiarity with specific AI frameworks are genuinely nice-to-haves rather than must-haves we dont expect one person to tick every box on day one. What matters most is strong Python engineering solid integration skills real Linux competence and the ability to diagnose a complex physical product end to end. If thats you wed love to hear from you even if some of the nice to have list is unfamiliar.