Applied AI Engineer

About the role

We’re looking for a Member of Technical Staff to help build the speech and language models behind Salient’s production voice agents. You’ll tackle challenging real‑world problems in speech and language modeling that go beyond academic benchmarks. This high‑ownership position on a small, elite team directly impacts revenue.

Key responsibilities

• Build and improve production speech models and systems to enhance real‑time conversational quality.
• Post‑train large language models for voice agents used in consumer finance.
• Develop evaluation frameworks, harnesses, and monitoring systems.
• Collaborate across models, data, infrastructure, and product to boost end‑to‑end agent performance.
• Own major technical areas from problem definition through production deployment.

Required profile

• Strong engineering fundamentals with the ability to build reliable production systems.
• Experience with speech modeling or LLM post‑training; familiarity with ASR, TTS, turn detection, speech enhancement, multilingual speech, or model evaluation.
• Ability to diagnose messy real‑world model failures and turn them into practical improvements.
• High ownership, fast execution speed, and comfort operating in ambiguous technical areas.
• Prior experience in speech modeling and LLM post‑training is ideal but not mandatory; we value technical ability and drive.

Required skills

• Speech modeling
• LLM post‑training
• Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)
• Text‑to‑Speech (TTS)
• Turn detection
• Speech enhancement
• Multilingual speech processing
• Model evaluation

What we offer

• Work on the full stack of production voice AI.
• Own and lead core product areas on a small, high‑caliber team.
• Ship improvements that affect millions of live conversations.
• Address real‑world speech problems that remain unsolved outside benchmarks.
• Fast‑paced environment with 60‑hour weeks and four days of in‑person collaboration in San Francisco.
• Benefits package: medical, dental, vision coverage, generous 401(k), and catered lunches.