Luke
Halley
Lead Engineer @ VerticalAI Voice AI · Perth
I build the real-time runtime behind
voice and text agents that answer
the calls Australian businesses miss.
13+ years building cloud platforms before that.
VerticalAI
Now · Lead Engineer · Sep 2026 - Present
VerticalAI builds voice and text agents that answer the calls an Australian business misses. Built in Perth, hosted in Sydney. It is my first startup: what I ship in the morning is on a live call that afternoon.
A web form or CRM posts the enquiry. The agent rings the lead back.
Every call answered, out of hours included.
Agents hold long, multi-step conversations on real calls.
Calls run on our own infrastructure, hosted in Sydney.
What I build
- 01
Voice runtime
The runtime that holds a live phone conversation: listening, thinking, speaking, and knowing when to stop talking.
- 02
Synthetic callers
A test suite that rings the agent with synthetic callers before any change ships.
- 03
Platform and CI/CD
Infrastructure and deployment pipelines across three environments.
- 04
Agent builder
The web app customers use to build and monitor their agents.
Shipped · Oct 2026
Lead callbacks in under three seconds
- 1Your website form or CRM posts the enquiry.
- 2The agent calls the number the lead typed in.
- 3It says up front that it is an AI and asks two or three questions.
- 4It puts the lead through to your team to close.
Team case study
The Mayfair, Emerald
The team built the whole courtesy-bus dispatch, not just the phone agent: bookings by phone, a driver job board, address checks with read-back, and landmark lookups for patrons without a street address.
Read the case studyProduction data, 25 Aug to 15 Sep 2026.
Stack
Gave my first ProductTank Perth talk, with Brian Foody, in October 2026.
Missing calls?
See what a VerticalAI agent would do with them.
About
Since Sep 2026 I've been Lead Engineer at VerticalAI, building the platform its voice and text agents run on. Real-time voice is the newest thing I've worked on, and now it's the day job.
Before that I was the sole architect of the AWS cloud platform at Mineral Resources (Dec 2024 - Jun 2026), used by 100+ development teams. I built the CI/CD template library, a serverless build-agent platform, the account factory and a self-hosted Terraform stack. $369K a year in documented savings.
Before that, 5 years at Verizon Connect in Ireland (May 2019 - Sep 2024): migrating 200+ repositories to GitLab, moving workloads from EC2 to Fargate, and building source-controlled Octopus Deploy templates. I started with a First Class Honours BSc in the Internet of Things from Waterford Institute of Technology.
