Lead ML Engineer, Voice & Text AI Agents (Hybrid)

AppFolio Inc; Atlanta (GA); On-site; USD 167,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

AppFolio is seeking a Senior Machine Learning Engineer to design and ship voice and conversational AI agents within Realm-X. This role sits at the intersection of LLM agent frameworks, real-time voice technology, and streaming infrastructure.

You will work with Product, Voice channel, and ML Platform teams to translate cutting-edge agent and voice research into reliable, low-latency, multi-channel experiences that scale across our entire customer base.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience developing and scaling web-based applications, preferably in a SaaS environment.
• Shipped production AI agents serving real users in voice and/or text channels.
• Think in pipelines and systems, not just models.
• Move fast, deliver impact, and maintain sound engineering judgment.

Responsibilities

• Ship Voice & Text Agents: Architect and ship voice and text agent pipelines that handle real-time, multi-turn customer interactions.
• Reasoning vs. Latency: Make principled trade-offs between reasoning depth and latency across frontier LLMs, smaller models, and routing strategies.
• Lead a Pod: Lead a small pod of ML and platform engineers; raise the bar on agent evaluation, observability, and incident response.
• Define Quality: Partner with Product and Voice channel teams to define KPIs, eval harnesses, and acceptance criteria for agent quality.
• Optimize for Voice: Drive selective Small Language Model (SLM) fine-tuning and inference optimization for voice latency and cost.

Skills

Agent frameworks

LLM reasoning

Voice technology

Latency optimization

Leadership

Education

Bachelor’s, Master’s, or Ph.D. in Computer Science or related technical discipline

Tools

LangChain

LangGraph

LangSmith

LangChain Deep Agents

Twilio

AWS

Python

WebSockets

Docker

Job description

AppFolio is seeking a Senior Machine Learning Engineer to design and ship voice and conversational AI agents within Realm-X. This role sits at the intersection of LLM agent frameworks, real-time voice technology, and streaming infrastructure.

You will work with Product, Voice channel, and ML Platform teams to translate cutting-edge agent and voice research into reliable, low-latency, multi-channel experiences that scale across our entire customer base.