AI Experience Engineer (Conversational AI)

Upgrade, Inc.; Montreal (administrative region); On-site; CAD 140,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary CAN 140K–180K

Stock option plan

Medical/dental/vision insurance

Parental leave

Professional growth opportunities

Job summary

Upgrade, Inc. is seeking an AI Experience Engineer to own customer-facing AI journeys across chat, voice and email.

You will design, implement and continuously improve production journeys using Sierra Agent Studio, partnering with product and customer operations to ensure safe, accurate and timely resolutions. In this role you will own end-to-end journeys across Personal Loans, Card, BNPL and more, setting standards for how Upgrade builds, tests and ships AI experiences while maintaining

Qualifications

• 3–5 years of frontend software engineering or equivalent in related roles.
• Experience with LLM agents: instructions, tool calls, retrieval, and failures.
• Ability to read APIs and reason about authorization and permissions.
• Ownership of production rollouts, monitoring and incident response.

Responsibilities

• Design and build Sierra journeys in Agent Studio for chat, voice and email.
• Review transcripts and analytics weekly; fix failures and transfers.
• Map edge cases like failed payments and identity mismatches.
• Own containment and CSAT targets with staged rollouts.
• Collaborate with product groups to scope journeys and define needed APIs.
• Apply safety and guardrails to prevent hallucinations and off-policy answers.
• Design transfers to human agents with summaries and auth context.
• Build simulation and regression suites for journey changes.
• Monitor latency, errors and drop-offs; manage alerts.
• Tune voice latency, tone and interruptions.
• Escalate platform issues and shape Sierra roadmap.

Skills

Frontend engineering

Conversational AI

Operations mindset

Ownership in production

Tools

Sierra Agent Studio

API specs

REST/GraphQL

Job description

An AI Experience Engineer owns the full lifecycle of the journeys our customers have with Upgrade's AI agent on chat, voice and email: creation, optimization, edge case handling and containment growth. They build journeys in Sierra's no-code tooling, partner with Upgrade's product groups to bring their servicing flows to the agent, and are accountable for whether the agent resolves the customer's issue safely, accurately and without a human.

We are hiring an AI Experience Engineer to own Upgrade's customer-facing AI agent. You will sit between engineering, product and customer operations. You will turn servicing workflows, such as making a payment, checking loan details, updating an address or enabling autopay, into production journeys and keep improving them after launch. You will build and own the journeys end to end, from first draft to steady state. The work is part builder, part analyst: design the flow, handle the edge cases, read the transcripts, and keep raising containment. Containment, CSAT, transfer quality and hallucination rate are your metrics.

Within your first year, you will own a portfolio of journeys across products (Personal Loans, Card, BNPL, HELOC, Deposits) and help set the standards for how Upgrade builds, tests and ships AI experiences.

Our Core Technologies

What You'll Do

• Journey creation: Design and build Sierra journeys in Agent Studio for chat, voice and email, from discovery with operations through production rollout
• Optimization: Review transcripts, recordings and analytics every week, find where conversations fail or transfer, and ship fixes to journey logic, instructions and knowledge
• Edge case handling: Map the unhappy paths (failed payments, mismatched identity, delinquent accounts, unsupported requests) and make sure each ends in a correct answer or a clean handoff
• Containment: Own containment and CSAT targets per journey, run staged rollouts (1% → 100%), and prioritize the work that moves those numbers most
• Product partnership: Work with product groups (Personal Loans, Card, BNPL, Deposits) to scope new journeys, keep journeys current as products change, and define the APIs the agent needs
• Safety and compliance: Apply tiered authentication and step-up verification, verbatim compliance language and guardrails against hallucination and off-policy answers
• Handoffs: Design transfers to human agents in Genesys with accurate summaries and auth context
• Testing: Build simulation and regression suites so every journey change ships with evidence it did not break existing behavior
• Monitoring: Watch latency, errors and drop-offs in SumoLogic and Grafana, and own the alerts
• Voice tuning: Latency, filler phrases, interruptions, personality and tone
• Sierra relationship: Be the technical owner on our side, escalate platform issues and shape roadmap asks

What We Look For

• 3–5 years of Frontend Software Engineering experience, or equivalent experience in Solutions Engineering, Conversational AI or Technical Product roles
• Working knowledge of how LLM agents behave: instructions, tool calls, knowledge retrieval, and where each one fails
• Experience building evaluations for non-deterministic systems: test sets, simulations, LLM-as-judge, regression gates
• Enough technical depth to read API specs, work with backend engineers on REST and GraphQL integrations, and reason about authorization and permission scopes
• Product and customer mindset: you understand ops procedures, you read transcripts, care about tone, and measure success by whether the customer's problem got solved
• Ownership in production: rollouts, monitoring, log analysis and incident response
• Clear writing and the ability to work with non-engineers in operations, compliance and legal

Nice To Have

• Hands-on experience with Sierra Agent Studio, or a comparable no-code agent platform (Decagon, Ada, Kore.ai, Google CCAI, Amazon Lex/Connect)
• Voice AI experience: speech-to-text, text-to-speech, latency tuning, barge-in handling
• Contact center systems such as Genesys, and agent handoff design
• Background in fintech or another regulated industry (UDAAP, FDCPA, TCPA, PCI, SOC 2)

What We Offer You

• Competitive salary ($140K-$180K CAN) and stock option plan
• Paid coverage of medical, dental and vision insurance
• Opportunities for professional growth and development
• Paid parental leave