Senior ML Engineer, Conversational AI & Voice Systems

Appfolio; Chicago (IL); On-site; USD 167,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

AppFolio seeks a Senior Machine Learning Engineer to design and ship voice/text agents within Realm-X, pushing the next generation of AI-powered real estate workflows. You will collaborate with Product, Voice, and ML Platform teams to translate cutting-edge agent research into reliable, low-latency experiences across channels.

You will lead a pod of ML and platform engineers, shaping agent evaluation, observability, and incident response while balancing latency, cost, and quality metrics.

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.
• Experience defining and shipping end-to-end pipelines and systems, not just models.
• Strong leadership and collaboration with product/design.
• Comfort with rapid delivery and sound engineering judgment.
• Value work-life balance as a foundation for sustained performance.

Responsibilities

• Architect and ship voice and text agent pipelines for real-time, multi-turn interactions.
• Balance reasoning depth with latency across models and routing strategies.
• Lead a small pod of ML and platform engineers; raise the bar on observability and incident response.
• Define KPIs and evaluation harnesses for agent quality.
• Drive fine-tuning and inference optimization for voice latency and cost.

Skills

Leadership

Collaboration

Problem solving

Communication

Strategy

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

LangChain

LangGraph

LangSmith

LangChain Deep Agents

Twilio

AWS

Python

Async programming

WebSockets

Docker

Voice-to-Voice models

Job description

AppFolio seeks a Senior Machine Learning Engineer to design and ship voice/text agents within Realm-X, pushing the next generation of AI-powered real estate workflows. You will collaborate with Product, Voice, and ML Platform teams to translate cutting-edge agent research into reliable, low-latency experiences across channels.

You will lead a pod of ML and platform engineers, shaping agent evaluation, observability, and incident response while balancing latency, cost, and quality metrics.