Lead ML Engineer - Real-Time Voice & AI Agents

AppFolio; Santa Barbara (CA); Hybrid; USD 167,000 - 209,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work model

Job summary

AppFolio is seeking a Senior Machine Learning Engineer to design and ship the next generation of voice and conversational AI agents within Realm-X. You will collaborate with Product, Voice channel, and ML Platform teams to translate cutting-edge agent research into reliable, low-latency experiences that scale for our real estate customers.

You will lead a small pod of ML and platform engineers, shaping agent evaluation, observability, and incident response while driving KPIs and quality

Qualifications

• Shipped production AI agents for voice and/or text channels.
• Think in pipelines and systems, not just models.
• Able to balance impact with engineering judgment.

Responsibilities

• Ship Voice & Text Agents pipelines for real-time multi-turn interactions.
• Balance reasoning depth and latency across frontier LLMs and smaller models.
• Lead a small pod of ML and platform engineers and drive agent evaluation and observability.
• Define KPIs and acceptance criteria for agent quality with cross-functional partners.
• Optimize for voice latency and cost through selective fine-tuning and inference strategies.

Skills

Python

Async programming

WebSockets

LLM reasoning

Team leadership

Voice/Text AI

Tools

LangChain

LangGraph

LangSmith

LangChain Deep Agents

Twilio

AWS

Docker

Job description

AppFolio is seeking a Senior Machine Learning Engineer to design and ship the next generation of voice and conversational AI agents within Realm-X. You will collaborate with Product, Voice channel, and ML Platform teams to translate cutting-edge agent research into reliable, low-latency experiences that scale for our real estate customers.

You will lead a small pod of ML and platform engineers, shaping agent evaluation, observability, and incident response while driving KPIs and quality