AI Experience Engineer (Conversational AI)

Upgrade, Inc.; Regina; On-site; CAD 140,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Stock options

Medical coverage

Professional growth

Parental leave

Job summary

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

You will design, build and productionize journeys from discovery with operations through rollout, ensuring safe, accurate and scalable interactions. You will analyze transcripts, optimize containment and CSAT, and partner with product teams for new journeys across Personal Loans, Card, BNPL, HELOC and Deposits.

Qualifications

• 3–5 years in frontend software engineering or equivalent in AI/solutions roles.
• Working knowledge of LLM agent behaviors and failure modes.
• Experience building evaluations for non-deterministic systems.
• Ability to read API specs and reason about auth/permissions.
• Product-minded with focus on customer outcomes.
• Production ownership including monitoring and incident response.

Responsibilities

• Design and build Sierra journeys in Agent Studio for chat, voice and email.
• Review transcripts and analytics weekly; fix conversation failures.
• Map edge cases and ensure correct answers or clean handoffs.
• Own containment and CSAT targets; manage staged rollouts.
• Collaborate with Product for new journeys and APIs needs.
• Apply governance to safety, compliance and guardrails.
• Design transfers to human agents with accurate context.
• Build simulations/regressions to protect existing behavior.
• Monitor latency, errors and drop-offs; manage alerts.
• Tune voice aspects and overall agent personality.

Skills

Frontend software engineering

LLM agent behavior

Non-deterministic systems testing

REST/GraphQL integrations

Operations collaboration

Clear writing

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