Voice AI ML Engineer — In-Office DTLA, Equity

Guava; Los Angeles (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health, dental, and vision coverage

401(k) match

Flexible PTO

Equity

Job summary

Guava is seeking engineers to build the best tools in voice, working across the model lifecycle from experimentation to production deployment for real, regulated phone calls.

You will design, train, and evaluate ML models, build LLM-based components, and ensure scalable, low-latency inference with cost awareness. You’ll collaborate with governance teams and stay ahead of research to push practical, production-ready ideas.

Qualifications

• CS fundamentals, data structures, and algorithms.
• Strong foundation in linear algebra and probability.
• Production ML experience in NLP/speech is preferred.

Responsibilities

• Design, train, and evaluate ML models across Guava's platform: ASR, TTS, intent recognition, dialogue systems, summarization, and related NLP/NLU tasks.
• Build and maintain LLM-based components in production—prompting, fine-tuning, structured outputs, tool calling, and retrieval where appropriate.
• Pipeline and manage large, real-world datasets, including labeling workflows and data quality checks.
• Take models from prototype to production: benchmark performance, validate against target accuracy, and ship with monitoring in place.
• Partner with the Call Review and LLM working groups to root-cause production issues — ASR errors, hallucinations, latency, turn-taking — and turn them into model improvements.
• Contribute to model governance: maintain the model inventory, document validation results, and support risk assessment for new deployments.
• Work closely with platform and infrastructure engineers to optimize inference latency and cost at scale.
• Stay current with ML/NLP research and bring practical, production-ready ideas back to the team.

Skills

CS fundamentals

Python

NLP/ML experience

LLM deployment

Data handling

Independent thinker

GPU training

Education

MS or PhD in CS/ML

Tools

GPU acceleration

Production ML tooling

Job description

Guava is seeking engineers to build the best tools in voice, working across the model lifecycle from experimentation to production deployment for real, regulated phone calls.

You will design, train, and evaluate ML models, build LLM-based components, and ensure scalable, low-latency inference with cost awareness. You’ll collaborate with governance teams and stay ahead of research to push practical, production-ready ideas.