AI Engineer, Agentic Voice (TTS)

United States Digital Space LLC; Vancouver; Hybrid; CAD 110,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

United States Digital Space LLC in Vancouver is seeking an AI Engineer on the Speech Team to own the back-end implementation and linguistic optimization of the voice (TTS) layer for next-generation AI agents. You’ll integrate TTS engines, shape persona parameters, and ensure scalable voice experiences.

You will work with the Speech Team to bridge speech science and product engineering, optimize latency, and craft reliable, human-like voice interactions across the platform.

Qualifications

• Strong Python development skills with hands-on experience in deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch.
• Experience in Speech Synthesis (TTS) or applied speech ML is required or highly desirable.

Responsibilities

• TTS backend implementation: integrate and optimize multiple TTS vendor APIs behind a unified interface with failover; prototype open-source and in-house architectures.
• Latency and pipeline engineering: reduce time-to-first-audio and end-to-end latency in the ASR → LLM → TTS pipeline while maintaining voice quality.
• Linguistic optimization: apply phonetics and sociolinguistics to format TTS input for naturalness including SSML, punctuation-driven prosody, and name/number/date/currency normalization.
• Persona system & parameter exposure: build and expose voice attributes to the product UI according to house standards.
• Prompt engineering as code: manage structured LLM and TTS prompts with versioning and evaluation harness.

Skills

Python

PyTorch

Speech Synthesis

Job description

About the companythe company 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, the company 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 the company. the company is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, GV, ICONIQ Capital, and T-Mobile.

Being a Dialer At the company, 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 RoleAs an AI Engineer on our Speech Team, you'll own the back-end implementation and linguisticoptimization 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