Key Roles and Responsibilities

• Design, author, and maintain production-grade prompts for AI voice bots deployed across outbound debt collections campaigns and inbound collections IVR in English and Swahili.
• Optimise prompt structure using Markdown formatting principles (headers, delimiters, instruction hierarchy) to maximise model comprehension and minimise token overhead and call latency.
• Tune and test prompts on Gemini 2.5 Flash (Google AI Studio / Vertex AI) and OpenAI GPT-4o, benchmarking outputs against latency, coherence, and collections compliance targets.
• Evaluate how prompt length, token count, instruction complexity, and model parameters (temperature, max_tokens, streaming) affect inference latency and per-call cost.
• Implement and iterate on system prompts, few-shot examples, persona definitions, objection-handling branches, promise-to-pay capture logic, and fallback scripts for edge-case scenarios.
• Conduct structured QA audits on sampled collections call recordings, scoring against defined parameters (script adherence, tone, promise-to-pay handling, loan disclosure compliance).
• Maintain a versioned prompt change log with A/B test configurations and measurable outcome data; produce regular performance summaries for the Call Center Manager.
• Coordinate with the DC IT Technical Support Officer on API configurations, Webitel IVR routing, SIP trunk settings, and system-level constraints that affect prompt deployment.
• Collaborate with collections strategy teams to translate DPD bucket cadence rules and product-specific scripts (Boda, Tuk-Tuk, smartphone loans) into accurate bot logic.
• Liaise with AI vendors on ASR quality, voice synthesis settings, and integration constraints relevant to Kenya collections operations.
• Monitor per-call cost metrics and propose prompt changes that improve recovery rates and ROI without compromising quality or compliance.
• Any other duties that may be assigned.

Experience

• Minimum 1–2 years of hands-on experience in prompt engineering, conversational-AI / chatbot design, NLP, or a closely related role. Candidates with strong, demonstrable project work and shorter formal tenure may be considered.
• Demonstrated experience designing and deploying prompts or dialogue flows for production LLM or voice-bot systems — not solely experimental or academic work.
• Track record of tuning and evaluating prompts against measurable KPIs and running structured A/B tests to improve real-world outcomes.
• Prior exposure to contact-centre, telephony, or IVR environments, ideally in collections, customer service, or financial services.
• Experience in or alongside debt collections, lending, fintech, BPO, or banking operations is a strong advantage.
• Experience collaborating with cross-functional teams (IT, strategy, operations) and managing third-party AI / voice-vendor relationships is desirable.
• Experience producing English- and Swahili-language conversational content for a Kenyan or East African customer base is highly desirable.

Qualifications

Education & Certifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Computational Linguistics, Data Science, or a related field. Equivalent, demonstrable hands-on experience in prompt engineering or conversational AI will be considered in lieu of a degree.
• A reviewable portfolio of production prompt work — prompt libraries, system prompts, evaluation harnesses, or published repositories — that can be walked through at interview.
• Certification in Google Cloud (Vertex AI / Generative AI), OpenAI, or an equivalent LLM / conversational-AI program is an added advantage.

Technical Skills:

•  Hands-on command of core prompt-engineering techniques: system and role prompting, few-shot and chain-of-thought design, delimiter and Markdown structuring, output schema and constraint control, and guardrail / fallback design.
• Working proficiency with at least one major LLM platform — Google Gemini (AI Studio / Vertex AI) and/or OpenAI GPT-4o — including parameter tuning (temperature, max_tokens, top-p, streaming) and a practical grasp of tokenization and context-window economics.
• Understanding of voice-AI pipelines — automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS) — and how transcription accuracy, latency, and barge-in behaviour affect live call performance.
•  Familiarity with IVR / telephony concepts: Webitel or comparable contact-centre platforms, SIP trunking, call routing, and API-based integrations.
• Ability to read and reason about JSON API request/response payloads and to work in API consoles (e.g., Postman). Basic scripting in Python or JavaScript for prompt testing and batch evaluation is an advantage.
• Competence in designing and interpreting A/B tests and quantitative metrics — latency, containment, promise-to-pay rate, recovery rate, and cost-per-call.

Language & Domain Knowledge:

• Full professional fluency in English and Swahili, with the ability to author, review, and QA bot dialogue and call scripts in both languages.
• Awareness of debt-collections conduct standards and Kenyan consumer-protection and data-privacy obligations, including the Data Protection Act, 2019 and CBK consumer-protection expectations.

Personal Attributes:

• Strong analytical and problem-solving mindset with meticulous attention to detail.
•  Comfortable with ambiguous requirements and rapid, data-driven iteration.
• Clear written and verbal communicator who can translate technical findings for non-technical stakeholders.
• Self-driven and organised, able to maintain a versioned change log across multiple concurrent campaigns.