Improve our LIVE WhatsApp sales bot (Python + Claude API)

- THE SITUATION: We sell premium beef jerky in Paraguay via WhatsApp - cash on delivery, cold traffic from Meta ads, Spanish ("vos"). Our WhatsApp sales bot ALREADY EXISTS and is talking to real customers right now. You are not building from scratch. You are making an existing, working system sell better. You will get a WhatsApp number to chat with our current bot yourself before you commit to anything, so you know exactly what you're taking on. THE STACK YOU'LL WORK IN: (no platform migration - you adapt OUR code) - Custom Python backend (FastAPI), deployed via GitHub Actions - Deterministic state machine for the sales flow, prices and orders (the AI never invents numbers — that stays) - LLM layer (Anthropic Claude API) for understanding and routing - PostgreSQL, WhatsApp gateway, decision logging, full automated eval suite (every behavior change must keep ~230 test cases green) - THE PROBLEM: Reply quality in the messy real world: customers go off-script, stall ("thanks, I'll let you know"), ask sideways questions - and the bot doesn‘t always pull them back into the scriptforward to the close. Your job: make the bot sound human, never break character, recover off-script customers, and advance every conversation toward the sale - inside our existing codebase. - THE #1 REQUIREMENT WE WILL TEST YOUR BOT You must have already built a WhatsApp sales bot for another company that is live and closing sales. In your proposal, include a WhatsApp number where we can chat with a bot YOU built (a sandbox/demo clone is fine if the client is confidential). We will personally throw our 10 hardest real-customer scenarios at it. If your bot handles them, you're shortlisted. Also include: what it sold, rough conversation volume, and 2–3 anonymized transcripts of YOUR bot recovering an off-script customer. - PAYMENT: SUCCESS-BASED VIA ESCROW MILESTONES We define ~20 pass/fail test scenarios from our real chats together and in writing BEFORE you start. Funds sit in Upwork escrow and are released when our bot passes the agreed scenarios (plus our eval suite stays green and zero pricing/order errors). Optional performance bonus on top if live conversion improves over the following 14 days. If you're good, this becomes a long-term on-call role. - MUST-HAVES: - Shipped, testable WhatsApp sales bot for a real company (see above) - Comfortable working inside an existing custom Python codebase - NOT: ManyChat/no-code platform sellers, agencies, "AI consultants" without a live bot to show Start your proposal with the word „Jerky“ so we know you read this. Thank you for your time 🙏🏼