R&D; & Automation Engineer

Company: Imitate Labs

Location: Chennai (Thiruvanmiyur) On-site

Experience: 1–2.5 Years

Employment Type: Full-time

Joining: September / October 2026

Reports To: Founder & CEO

About Imitate Labs

Imitate Labs is building Aurra Sales Agent, a live AI voice calling platform serving B2B SMEs across India in industries including real estate, insurance, automotive, clinics, edtech, and NBFCs.

We are looking for an R&D; & Automation Engineer to build the next generation of automation, intelligence, and revenue-generating capabilities around Aurra.

This is a hands-on builder role focused on research, experimentation, automation, AI integrations, and data-driven product capabilities.

You will work closely with the Founder & CEO and alongside our Product Engineer, who owns production maintenance, uptime, and incident response.

This role is intentionally different from a production/on-call engineering role. You will not be responsible for firefighting production incidents or maintaining uptime. Your focus is on building new capabilities that make Aurra cheaper to operate, faster to extend, and capable of generating more value per client.

Key Responsibilities

1. AI & Voice Stack R&D; — Cost Optimization

- Research and benchmark alternative technologies across the AI voice stack.
- Evaluate alternatives to technologies such as LiveKit, Cartesia, Soniox, Pipecat, AI Acoustics, and Gemini Flash Lite.
- Run structured experiments comparing cost, latency, reliability, and call quality.
- Identify opportunities to reduce Aurra's cost-per-minute without compromising customer experience.
- Research and iterate toward lower-cost call disposition and classification models.
- Build prototypes and proof-of-concepts to validate technical and commercial assumptions.
- Document experiments, benchmarks, and recommendations so technical decisions are data-driven and auditable.

1. Automation & Workflow Orchestration

- Design and build business automations using n8n, Make, Zapier, or similar orchestration platforms.
- Automate internal workflows such as:

- Hiring workflows

- Resume screening and triage
- AI-based first-round candidate screening

- Lead routing
- Automated follow-ups
- Internal notifications and operational workflows
- Build integrations between Aurra and external systems such as WhatsApp, email, CRM platforms, dashboards, and internal tools.
- Work extensively with REST APIs, webhooks, authentication, JSON, and third-party integrations.
- Design reliable retry, error-handling, logging, and failure-recovery mechanisms.




- Ensure automations can run unattended without silent failures.

1. Aurra Intelligence Layer

Build a new analytics and intelligence layer that will become a paid product add-on for Aurra customers.

Responsibilities include

- Develop lead scoring systems such as Hot / Warm / Cold based on call sentiment, engagement, intent, and conversation signals.
- Identify and report recurring objection patterns across clients and industry verticals.
- Build call optimization insights, including:
- Best-performing call windows

- Script performance

- Conversation outcomes
- Client-specific personalization opportunities
- Develop client health scoring models.
- Build ROI, cost-per-lead, conversion, and campaign performance reporting.
- Work with structured and unstructured call data to identify actionable business insights.

This is revenue-facing engineering work. The systems you build will be used by customers and designed as paid product capabilities.

1. Inbound & Growth Engineering

- Build automation around website lead generation and form submissions.
- Trigger automated outreach when new inbound leads are received.
- Support technical integrations for Meta Ads and lead-generation campaigns.
- Build and extend AI-based first-call screening workflows for:

- Sales leads

- Job applicants
- Support automation across multiple business verticals, including:

- Real Estate

- Insurance

- Automotive

- Clinics

- EdTech

- NBFC

What You Will NOT Be Doing This role is deliberately focused on R&D;, automation, and new capability development.

You will not be primarily responsible for:

- Production uptime or on-call support
- Live incident response
- Routine production firefighting
- Maintaining existing infrastructure as your primary responsibility
- UI/frontend development as your main focus
- Direct client communication

Our Product Engineer owns production maintenance and uptime. Your job is to build what comes next.

Requirements

Must Have

- 1–2.5 years of professional software engineering experience with real production code.
- Strong hands-on programming experience in Python and/or Node.js.




- Demonstrable experience building workflows using n8n, Make, Zapier, or a comparable automation/orchestration platform.
- Strong understanding of APIs, REST, webhooks, JSON, authentication, and third-party integrations.
- Ability to connect multiple systems that were not originally designed to work together.
- Comfortable debugging integrations and building reliable automation workflows.
- Ability to take a loosely defined problem and independently:

- Research possible solutions

- Build a prototype

- Run experiments

- Measure results

- Recommend a solution
- Strong ownership and bias toward building and shipping.

Strong Bonus Experience with any of the following will be a significant advantage:
- LLM APIs — OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, etc.
- AI agents / agentic workflows
- RAG pipelines
- Prompt engineering and LLM evaluation
- AI voice / conversational AI systems
- WebSockets / real-time systems
- Computer vision
- Speech-to-text / text-to-speech systems
- Data analytics and reporting
- Building dashboards used by customers or internal teams
- CRM, WhatsApp, Meta Ads, or marketing automation integrations
- Experience with workflow automation platforms such as n8n, Make, Zapier

What We're Looking For We are looking for someone who enjoys figuring things out and building from scratch.

You should be comfortable when the problem is not perfectly defined. Instead of waiting for detailed specifications, you should be able to ask:

"What are we trying to improve, how can we measure it, and what can I build to test it?"

This role is particularly suited to engineers who enjoy:

- Rapid prototyping
- AI experimentation
- Automation
- API integrations
- Building internal tools
- Reducing infrastructure/API costs
- Turning manual processes into reliable systems
- Working with emerging AI technologies
- Owning projects end-to-end

Why Join Imitate Labs?
- Work directly with the Founder & CEO on high-impact technical projects.
- Build systems that directly influence revenue and product capability.
- Work hands-on with AI voice, LLMs, automation, APIs, and real-time systems.
- Own experiments from idea prototype measurement production.
- Build current product surfaces rather than spending your time only maintaining existing systems.
- High autonomy with the opportunity to shape the technical direction of Aurra's automation and intelligence layer.

If you enjoy building, experimenting, automating, and turning messy problems into working systems, this role is for you. Role & responsibilities

📌 R&D & Automation Engineer (Chennai)
🏢 Imitate Labs
📍 Chennai