Join Salient as an Applied AI Engineer to build and improve production speech models for voice agents in the financial services sector.
Posted by employer 5 months ago
First seen on Joblaze 1 month ago
Last verified on the company career page 1 day ago
Skills & Technologies
AI in the day-to-day
Engineers work on challenging problems in speech and language modeling for production voice agents.
Not disclosed in this posting: compensation, years of experience, visa sponsorship.
Benefits
Joblaze summary
The Applied AI Engineer at Salient focuses on developing and enhancing speech and language models for production voice agents in the financial services sector. This role requires strong engineering skills and experience in speech modeling or LLM post-training, with an emphasis on diagnosing and resolving real-world model issues. Ideal candidates are driven engineers who thrive in high-ownership environments and are eager to tackle complex AI challenges. Salient's fast-paced, collaborative team environment fosters innovation and direct impact on millions of customer interactions.
Joblaze insights
Quick facts
- Is the Applied AI Engineer role remote?
- No — this is an on-site role in SF Headquarters.
- Where is the role based?
- Salient is hiring for this position in SF Headquarters.
- What's the tech stack?
- Joblaze extracted these technologies from the posting: ASR, LLM post-training, TTS, model evaluation, multilingual speech, speech enhancement.
- What seniority level is this role?
- Salient targets staff-level candidates for this position.
- Is this full-time or contract?
- Full-time for this Applied AI Engineer role at Salient.
From the original posting
We are:
Backed by a16z and Y Combinator, with $75M raised in Series A funding
Actively expanding into new financial services segments
Building together in person in San Francisco
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 work on challenging problems in speech and language modeling. Many of these problems look solved in academic benchmarks, but remain deeply unsolved in real-world production.
This is a high-ownership role on a small, elite team. You’ll own core parts of the system end to end, and everything you do will have direct revenue impact.
What You’ll Do
Build and improve production speech models and systems with the ultimate goal of improving real-time conversational quality.
Post-train LLMs for voice agents used for consumer finance.
Develop evals, harnesses, and monitoring systems.
Work across models, data, infrastructure, and product to improve end-to-end agent quality.
Own major technical areas with significant autonomy, from problem definition to production deployment.
What We’re Looking For
Strong engineering fundamentals and ability to build reliable production systems.
Experience with speech modeling, or LLM post-training.
Familiarity with areas such as ASR, TTS, turn detection, speech enhancement, multilingual speech, LLM post-training, or model evaluation.
Ability to diagnose messy real-world model failures and turn them into practical improvements.
High ownership, strong execution speed, and comfort operating in ambiguous technical areas.
Prior experience in speech modeling and LLM post-training is ideal, but not required. We care more about slope, intensity, and technical ability than exact background.
Exceptional engineers who are highly driven and excited to work on hard AI problems are encouraged to apply!
Why Join
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.
Tackle real-world speech problems that are still unsolved outside of benchmarks.
Standard company text repeated across Salient's postings is omitted here.