Lead Applied AI Engineer, Hospitality Voice AI

Slang; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 217,000 - 242,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health, dental, vision insurance

Equity package

Hybrid work in NYC

Professional development

Job summary

Slang AI, NYC hybrid, seeks an Applied AI Engineer to turn foundation models into restaurant-grade products. You will design interfaces, deploy prompts, and build evaluation tooling that ensures reliable, scalable AI for guest interactions.

You will lead end-to-end work from prototype to production monitoring, collaborating with backend, product, and design teams to drive real impact in hospitality-focused AI.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of software engineering, incl. production LLM work.
• Lead/tech-lead track record with long-term decisions.

Responsibilities

• Designs a provider-agnostic model interface for voice/text AI.
• Builds automated evaluation pipeline with production metrics.
• Runs model and prompt experiments in production with clear success metrics.
• Reduces AI errors by using deterministic tools/guardrails.
• Sets standards for prompt architecture, agents, and observability.
• Mentors engineers ramping into applied AI.

Skills

Software engineering

LLM applications

Tech lead

Prompt engineering

AI evaluation

Multi-model providers

Real-time voice AI

Backend programming

AI tooling

ASR/TTS

Open-weight hosting

Fine-tuning models

GCP Vertex AI

Dialogflow CX

Tools

LiteLLM

OpenRouter

Braintrust

Cekura

DSPy

LangGraph

Job description

Slang AI, NYC hybrid, seeks an Applied AI Engineer to turn foundation models into restaurant-grade products. You will design interfaces, deploy prompts, and build evaluation tooling that ensures reliable, scalable AI for guest interactions.

You will lead end-to-end work from prototype to production monitoring, collaborating with backend, product, and design teams to drive real impact in hospitality-focused AI.