The Team Behind the Bird at Kea: Building the Best Voice AI for Restaurants

When we started building Kea AI back in 2017, we made a conscious choice. We weren't going to be another software company that ships quarterly updates and calls it innovation. The restaurant industry doesn't work on quarterly cycles. Neither should we.

Our Engineering Team built a living system that is constantly evolving. We brought together top talent in engineering and product to deliver features that revolutionize the restaurant industry.

Where Kea AI is today is because of them. So we wanted to highlight their stories on what makes Kea so special.

The Restaurant Industry Moves Fast. We Move Faster.

Picture this: It's 5:47 PM on a Friday. A restaurant owner realizes they need to add a new limited time offer that starts tomorrow. With traditional voice AI systems, they'd be out of luck. Maybe they could get it updated by next week if they're lucky.

With Kea AI? By 5:49 PM, that new menu item is live, ready for the dinner rush.

This isn't an accident. It's by design. The Kea AI you see was rebuilt from the ground up by our incredible engineering team. Everything design with purpose in mind and with that unlocked a new age of Voice AI for Restaurants.

The Engineering and Product Team behind Kea AI.

Andre - Engineer

I’m a Software Engineer who loves to tinker and solve difficult problems.

Favorite Feature: Building the automated "Judge" for order accuracy. It was a fun challenge that keeps the team on our toes and helps us identify issues early.

What I love about Kea: Our collaborative environment. We truly build "four-handed" here. I love having the autonomy to drive features end-to-end and the opportunity to shape the requirements alongside the build.

Mateus - Engineer

I've been a programmer since I was 13. So technology is what I love and what I'll probably do for the rest of my life, lol.

Favorite Feature: It's hard to say which is my favorite feature. But I think that each integration with third-party technologies is always a challenge and a new learning experience.

What I love about Kea: I love the way we can work freely at Kea. Having the possibility to create completely new and creative things and still having high productivity and speed.

Leonan - Engineer

I love technology... when I was a kid, my dream was to be an inventor. Now, working as a SE, it feels like that childhood dream came true, because I get to build (invent) and create all sorts of things while solving real problems. I do believe that's one of the main reason why I love my job.

Favorite Feature: A lot (LOL), but I think Account Menu Ingestion, which was enabler for a lot of subsequent features like Customizable Upsell

What I love about Kea: Whole KEA 2.0 context!!!! I loved how we pivoted to a completely new product.

Rohan - Engineer

I started learning coding for the first time in college, and fell in love with the puzzle solving nature of the field. Outside of kea I love delving into that mindset of creation and problem solving through cooking and puzzlehunts.

Even through a remote context, the environment fostered at Kea is highly collaborative and fast paced, and it's truly the team that has made this possible. I'm very grateful for the team members that I am fortunate to be able to work alongside and learn from.

Favorite Feature & What I love about Kea: Our menu resolution. Menus are surprisingly complex entities, and it's definitely an interesting challenge parsing through them to ensure we yield the desired order for customers every time.

Rafael - Engineer

I've always been a such fan of soccer (football is the right name, c'mon), both watching my team (Flamengo 🔴 ⚫️) and playing since I was a kid.

Favorite Feature & What I love about Kea: For sure implementing kea.ai, so much knowledge gained, the flexibility and resilience that everybody on the team has is amazing.

Matheus - Engineer

I’m a software engineer who enjoys providing the best possible experience for users.

Favorite Feature: My favorite feature was the experiment of building multiple voices and the variability of the Voice AI. It required a significant overhaul of our architecture, ensuring backward compatibility for our customers and maintaining zero downtime.

What I love about Kea: I’m excited about the chance to experiment with new ideas and push the boundaries of my knowledge to deliver exceptional features quickly and independently.

Joel - Senior Technical Product Manager

My daughter asks me what I'm doing when I'm working. I tell her I make talking robots you can order food from. Her 3 year old brain thinks that's normal.

Favorite Feature: Customizable upsells and tons of reporting around it to see what's working or not. If someone orders a burger, should I upsell them on a drink, fries, or add-ons to the burger? I can run a test and see what's the most effective and profitable! You can't do that with human cashiers.

John - CPTO

I share this with the team all the time that our development philosophy centers on what I call 'The Dojo'. We're committed to continuous evaluation and experimentation, not just to deliver customer value, but to evolve how we build our core product. The future for Kea is exceptionally promising.

Favorite Feature: Menu complexity is fascinating to me. The way we've solved what I call 'The Hard Problem' mapping customer context to highly complex and sometimes poorly structured menus represents a significant technical achievement.

Max - Senior Product Manager

Restaurants are in my DNA—I grew up in the family business and even opened my own concept. What excites me is that this industry remains dramatically underserved by technology. Every time we reduce an owner's operational burden or unlock new capabilities, it validates why we're building Kea. When I'm not working, I'm either in the mountains or experimenting with wood-fired pizza.

Favorite Feature & What I love about Kea: I'm a strong believer that any critical tool should be fully functional on mobile. What we've built, a beautiful comprehensive mobile interface that lets you configure the AI from anywhere, is exceptional execution on that mission. Also, the Text AI feature is particularly ahead of its time. Watching customers interact with it in the wild has been awesome to see.

Looking Ahead

The restaurant industry is evolving faster than ever. Customer expectations are rising. Competition is fierce. Technology is advancing at breakneck speed. There’s a new Voice AI company almost every week.

That's why we'll keep shipping daily and will continue to stay on the edge for restaurants. I know our engineering team will keep pushing boundaries. That's why every morning, our restaurant partners wake up to a product that's better than it was yesterday.

Because in the end, great engineering isn't about writing perfect code. It's about solving real problems for real people, every single day.