Senior ML Engineer - Real-Time Voice & AI Agents

AppFolio; United States; Hybrid; USD 167,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

AppFolio seeks a Senior Machine Learning Engineer to design and ship voice and conversational AI agents within Realm-X, its AI-native platform for real estate. You will bridge LLM agent frameworks, real-time voice tech, and streaming infra, collaborating with Product, Voice, and ML Platform teams to deploy low-latency experiences at scale.

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

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.
• You move fast, deliver impact, and maintain sound engineering judgment.
• You are humble, collaborative, and low-ego, and you elevate those around you.

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

Python

WebSockets

Async programming

LLM reasoning

Team leadership

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

LangChain

LangGraph

LangSmith

LangChain Deep Agents

Docker

AWS

Twilio

Job description

AppFolio seeks a Senior Machine Learning Engineer to design and ship voice and conversational AI agents within Realm-X, its AI-native platform for real estate. You will bridge LLM agent frameworks, real-time voice tech, and streaming infra, collaborating with Product, Voice, and ML Platform teams to deploy low-latency experiences at scale.

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