AI Engineer, Agentic Voice (TTS)

Dialpad; Vancouver; On-site; CAD 161,500 - 191,500; Full time

Job summary

Dialpad in Vancouver, BC is hiring an AI Engineer on the Speech Team to own back-end implementation and linguistic optimization of the voice (TTS) layer for next-generation AI agents. You’ll work within a high-impact R&D group bridging speech science and product engineering to make agents sound human and trustworthy.

You’ll integrate TTS engines, design persona parameters, expose voice attributes in the UI, and collaborate with the Voice Experience Designer to implement house standards.

Qualifications

• Degree in Computational Linguistics, CS, or AI/ML with strong phonetics and prosody understanding.
• Experience with production-grade APIs and cloud integration (GCP preferred).
• 3+ years in Speech Synthesis or applied speech ML; hands-on with TTS.
• Experience with multi-vendor TTS APIs and evaluation metrics.

Responsibilities

• TTS backend integration and optimization across vendor APIs with a unified interface.
• Minimize latency in the ASR → LLM → TTS pipeline while maintaining voice quality.
• Apply phonetics and prosody to format TTS input and text normalization.
• Build persona parameterization and expose voice attributes to product UI.

Skills

Python

PyTorch

Speech Synthesis

Linguistics

Backend engineering

Evaluation metrics

Prompt engineering

Education

Degree in Computational Linguistics/CS/AI/ML

Tools

NVIDIA NeMo

ESPnet

Coqui

GCP

Job description

About Dialpad Dialpad is the AI platform for customer experience, built to resolve customer problems in real time across voice and digital. Our AI agents learn from your best human agents and improve with every interaction, helping organizations understand their customers, deliver better experiences, increase operational efficiencies, and build a lasting competitive advantage.

Unlike legacy systems built to route and answer, or standalone agentic bot vendors built to deflect, Dialpad was built to resolve. Our AI agents and human agents operate on a single platform with shared context, allowing Agentic AI to resolve issues, advance deals, and eliminate busywork through automation while seamlessly handing conversations to humans when needed, with full context preserved.

Market-leading brands, including Randstad, Motorola Solutions, Netflix, the San Diego Padres, the Colorado Rockies Baseball Club, and Cal Athletics, trust Dialpad. Dialpad is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, GV, ICONIQ Capital, and T-Mobile.

Being a Dialer
At Dialpad, AI isn’t just a feature; it’s how our teams do their best work every day. We put powerful AI tools in every employee’s hands so they can move faster, think bigger, and achieve more.

We believe every conversation matters. And we’ve built the platform that turns those conversations into insight and action, for our customers and ourselves.

We look for people who are intensely curious and hold themselves to a high bar. Our ambition is significant, and achieving it requires a team that operates at the highest level. We seek individuals who embody our core traits: Scrappy, Curious, Optimistic, Persistent, and Empathetic.

Your Role

As an AI Engineer on our Speech Team, you’ll own the back-end implementation and linguistic optimization of the voice (TTS) layer for our next-generation AI agents. You’ll work squarely within our Speech Team, a high-impact R&D and engineering group focused on speech recognition, enhancement, and synthesis; bridging core speech science and product engineering so our agents sound human, context-aware, and trustworthy.

You’ll build the systems that render voice: integrating and optimizing TTS engines, engineering the persona and parameter machinery, and exposing voice attributes to our customer-facing UI. You'll partner closely with our Voice Experience Designer, who authors and owns the persona standards and quality bar that you implement — you own the platform that makes their designs real, fast, and consistent at scale.

This position reports to our Sr. Manager, AI Speech, is based at our Vancouver hub, and operates on a hybrid schedule.

What you’ll do

• TTS backend implementation: Own the integration and optimization of multiple TTS vendor APIs behind a unified interface with failover, and lead research and prototyping of open-source and in-house TTS architectures.
• Latency & pipeline engineering: Minimize time-to-first-audio and end-to-end latency across the ASR → LLM → TTS pipeline while maintaining or optimizing voice quality, in partnership with ASR and Audio AI engineers.
• Linguistic optimization: Apply your knowledge of phonetics and sociolinguistics to format TTS input for maximum naturalness — SSML tags, punctuation-driven prosody, and text normalization for names, numbers, dates, and currency.
• Persona system & parameter exposure: Build the persona parameterization system and architect the logic that exposes voice attributes to the product UI, implementing the house standards defined by Agent Experience Design.
• Prompt engineering as code: Manage structured LLM and TTS prompt templates with versioning and a rigorous evaluation harness.
• Conversational turn design: Engineer context- and state-aware "thinking" utterances that maintain caller trust while tool calls and model steps run under the hood.

Skills you’ll bring

• Technical foundation: Strong Python and hands-on experience with deep learning frameworks (e.g. PyTorch).
• Speech expertise: 3+ years in Speech Synthesis (TTS) or applied speech ML, including hands-on work with frameworks like NVIDIA NeMo, ESPnet, or Coqui, and with major TTS APIs such as ElevenLabs, Rime, and Cartesia.
• Linguistic background: Degree in Computational Linguistics, Computer Science, or AI/ML, with a strong understanding of phonetics, prosody, and syntax you can apply in code (G2P, pronunciation dictionaries, text normalization).
• Backend engineering: Experience building production-grade APIs and integrating multi-vendor services in a cloud environment (GCP preferred).
• Evaluation mindset: Fluency with speech-quality metrics (MOS, intelligibility, latency) and the ability to design and execute rigorous A/B tests for voice personas.
• Prompt engineering: Proven experience crafting, versioning, and evaluating LLM prompts (system, few-shot) and structured templates.

This is a builder role in a science/infrastructure org. If your strength is conversation design or prompt-tuning without production engineering, our Lead Voice Experience (VX) Designer role is likely the better fit.

For exceptional talent based in British Columbia, Canada the target base salary range for this position is $161,500 - $191,500 CAD. The range displayed on each job posting reflects the target range for new hire salaries for the position. Salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. Within the range, individual pay is determined by work location and additional factors including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. Compensation details listed in British Columbia role postings reflect the base salary only, and do not include bonus, equity, or benefits.

Why Join Dialpad

• Work at the center of the AI transformation in business communications.
• Build and ship agentic AI products that are redefining how companies operate.
• Join a team where AI amplifies every employee’s impact.
• Competitive salary, comprehensive benefits, and real opportunities for growth.

Dialpad is an equal-opportunity employer. We are dedicated to creating a community of inclusion and an environment free from discrimination or harassment.