Founding AI Engineer - Multimodal Emotional AI

About the Project

Light Echo Dust is a long-term mission project exploring how AI can deepen human connection, not replace it.

We’re building a real-time emotional AI layer for dialogue:

audio emotion detection

video emotion detection

Whisper transcription

time-synced and fed into LLMs

visualised for a weekly podcast

This isn’t a hype startup — it’s meaningful, exploratory work at the intersection of psychology, AI and storytelling.

The first milestone is a working multimodal pipeline that can sense tone, tension, emotion shifts during a conversation and reflect it back cleanly.

The Role

We’re looking for a hands-on engineer who loves creating things from zero and iterating every week.

You’ll:

Build the real-time multimodal pipeline

Integrate audio/video emotion models \& Whisper

Sync and structure data into clean JSON

Build a simple output visualisation layer

Ship one improvement every sprint

Prototype fast, test fast, learn fast

You won’t:

do corporate engineering, Jira, meetings

build giant platforms

do research/data architecture (later hires)

This is a builder role, not a theory role.

Who You Are

indie dev or hacker mindset

emotionally intelligent (yes, for engineers)

cares about meaningful projects

bored by corporate tasks

can deliver fast, without drama

wants a long-term vision

No perfect CV needed — show us that you can ship.

Compensation

Stage 1 — Paid Trial (4 weeks)

fixed fee per week

small, clear deliverables

If we both love working together, we continue.

Stage 2 — Weekly Sprints

fixed fee per sprint

bonus for on-time delivery (10–15 percent)

optional discount if late

Clean, respectful partnership.

Stage 3 — Long-term Collaboration (if it flows)

Over time we explore:

deeper involvement

larger ownership in the system

long-horizon partnership

(no premature CTO promises)

Tech You’re Comfortable With

Python

Whisper

HuggingFace models

Emotion detection (audio or video)

OpenCV or similar

async pipelines

JSON data structuring

basic dashboards

integrating with LLM APIs

If you’ve built real-time systems or multimodal experiments, you’ll thrive.

Job Type: Contract

Contract length: 4 weeks

Pay: $35.69 – $67.01 per hour

Expected hours: No less than 10 per week

Work Location: Hybrid remote in Kallangur QLD 4503