Applied AI Engineer

Salient; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, and vision coverage

Generous 401(k)

Catered lunches

Job summary

Salient is seeking a Member of Technical Staff to build speech and language models for voice agents in San Francisco. You will tackle complex speech modeling problems and make significant contributions to real-world applications.

This role offers high ownership and collaboration within a small, elite team focused on production systems and improving conversational quality. Salient provides competitive benefits, including medical coverage and 401(k).

Qualifications

• Strong engineering fundamentals and ability to build reliable production systems.
• Experience with speech modeling, or LLM post-training.
• Ability to diagnose messy real-world model failures and turn them into practical improvements.

Responsibilities

• Build and improve production speech models and systems.
• Post-train LLMs for voice agents used for consumer finance.
• Develop evals, harnesses, and monitoring systems.

Skills

Strong engineering fundamentals

Experience with speech modeling

Ability to diagnose real-world model failures

High ownership

Job description

About Us

We’re building the AI infrastructure powering the future of financial operations - starting with automating the most painful and complex workflows in loan servicing.

• Backed by a16z and Y Combinator, with $65M raised in Series A funding.
• 8-figure ARR < 2 years already serving > 20% of the auto lending industry, and processing millions of real customer calls and transactions daily.
• Fully deployed with major financial institutions - not just PoCs.
• We are expanding into new financial services segments!
• In-person office culture in San Francisco, CA.

We're fully integrated with our customers, own the full stack, and are moving fast to bring modern AI into regulated industries where precision, reliability, and performance matter most.

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.

At Salient, we’re building at the edge of AI - fast, focused, and with real ownership. Sprints and major launches move quickly, and we look for people who are energized by that pace and ready to collaborate in person 4 days a week in our San Francisco office with a start time of 8:00 AM.

We also offer a benefits package designed to support our full-time employees: medical, dental, and vision coverage, a generous 401(k), and catered lunches.

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