Lia Pool - Senior Product Engineer | Conversational AI & Embodied Interfaces

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01About

I'm the person you hire when you have a problem but not a solution yet. Fifteen years building software products—nine of them taking user-facing conversational AI from first prototype to production at scale.

10 million sessions. 50 million minutes of interaction. That's not platform stats—that's from agents I built, authored, or materially improved: brand ambassadors, celebrity digital twins, AI tutors.

I take ambiguous problems and make them real through building. Give me a vague brief and I'll have something working before most people finish their discovery deck—and I'll own it through to the details users actually feel: latency, graceful failure, conversational tone. Along the way: a US patent for conversation orchestration, engineers mentored into leads, and AI-assisted development as a daily practice.

Patent

Conversation Orchestration in Interactive Agents

WO2022149076A1 / US20240054292A1

02Experience

Soul Machines

2017 - 2026

Senior Experience Engineer

2021 - 2026

Highly autonomous senior product engineering role reporting to Chief Product Officer. Led user-facing AI experiences end-to-end: shaped the product, built the features, and owned quality through to production.

Built agents generating 10M+ user sessions and 50M+ minutes of interaction
Designed and shipped React/TypeScript dashboards for understanding tens of thousands of conversations at a glance
Reduced typical response latency from ~3 seconds to ~2 seconds, with optimized configurations reaching ~1 second
Built conversation analytics and flow-reconstruction tooling adopted as company-wide standard
Mentored senior ICs and emerging tech leads; drafted the Product Engineering competency framework
Designed responsible AI framework establishing standards of care for coaching conversations

Product Manager, Growth

2019 - 2021

Drove platform strategy for conversation orchestration and customer enablement.

Championed and shipped Skills Platform — modular orchestration now embedded in 100K+ deployments with 99% adoption
Built HelloSam brand ambassador: 30K+ lifetime conversations, improved success rate from 50% to 75%

Solutions Architect

2018 - 2019

Technical architecture lead for enterprise implementations across UK, Europe, Singapore, and US.

Technical Project Manager

2017 - 2018

Delivered foundational conversation engineering patterns for enterprise clients. Delivered Digital People for Mercedes-Benz, Autodesk, ANZ, Air New Zealand.

Flatventure Ltd / Holonize

2015 - 2017

Co-founder

2015 - 2017

Co-founded AR startup building persistent shared augmented reality before ARKit/ARCore existed. Built novel computer vision systems and demonstrated technical innovation despite market timing challenges.

03Projects

Skills Platform

Soul Machines · 2019-2021

Customers spent 90 days trying to ship a conversational AI. I championed and drove creation of a modular conversation orchestration platform, reducing time-to-POC from ~90 days to minutes for template deployments. 100K+ deployments, 99% adoption, 6,300+ skills in production.

Making AI Feel Like Someone's Actually There

Soul Machines · 2022-2025

Mapped the full response pipeline, introduced streaming, TTS prediction, and parallelization to reduce typical latency to ~2 seconds, with optimized configurations reaching ~1 second. Then added vision so agents could actually see you.

Flatventure: Building Shared AR Before the Tools Existed

Flatventure Ltd · 2015-2017

Co-founded an AR startup in 2015 to build persistent shared augmented reality — before ARKit, before ARCore, before any of the tools that exist today. Built novel computer vision systems from scratch.

Standards of Care: Responsible AI for Coaching Conversations

Soul Machines · 2022-2025

AI coaching agents handle sensitive territory daily. I designed the framework for how they should behave — non-judgmental coaching that still redirects self-destructive thinking, protecting users, engineers, and company.

Body of Work

Soul Machines · 2017-2026

37 shipped projects across 8 years. Brand ambassadors, celebrity digital twins, AI tutors — 10 million sessions and 50 million minutes of interaction, built, authored, or materially improved.

04Skills

Core Strengths

Conversation design & orchestration, Product UI engineering, Real-time interaction systems, LLM orchestration & tool use, Multimodal analysis, AI-assisted development workflows

Engineering

TypeScript, React, Python, C#, Unity 3D, Real-time systems, Event-driven architecture

Product & UX

Rapid prototyping, User research, Journey mapping, Usability testing, Design collaboration, Instrumentation & success metrics, Stakeholder alignment, Roadmap ownership

Leadership & Mentoring

Mentoring senior ICs & emerging tech leads, Product Engineering competency framework, Interviewing & onboarding standards, Org-wide technical standards

Spatial & Vision

OpenCV, MediaPipe, SLAM, Vuforia, AR/VR, Spatial computing