# Senior AI Engineer

**Company:** [Dialpad](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/dialpad)
**Location:** Remote
**Role:** ML Engineering
**Salary:** $225k – $256k/yr
**Experience:** 5+ years
**Skills:** Python, PyTorch, Asr, Speech Recognition, Speech Enhancement, Audio Ai, Speech Models, Decoding, Real-Time Inference, Streaming Inference, Deep Learning, GCP, Backend Services, Observability
**Posted:** 2026-09-04

> Leads development of speech models, decoders, and low-latency inference systems for next-generation voice agents. Requires 5+ years in speech ML or related audio AI, strong Python and PyTorch experience, and the ability to guide technical direction and mentor engineers.

## Job Description

## Responsibilities
- Set technical direction for speech-model and decoder strategy across the team.
- Lead research, adaptation, and implementation of ASR/STT, speech-enhancement, and audio models.
- Improve end-to-end real-time speech pipelines, including decoding, endpointing, turn detection, streaming behavior, and ASR/LLM/TTS handoffs.
- Benchmark, prototype, fine-tune, distill, and adapt models and algorithms to improve voice-agent quality, latency, cost, and reliability.
- Design and ship production-grade services and inference components for real-time speech.
- Partner with speech, NLP, telephony, platform, product, and infrastructure engineers.
- Lead technical reviews, mentor teammates, and translate speech advances into measurable product improvements.

## Requirements
- 5+ years of experience in speech ML, speech recognition, speech enhancement, audio AI, or a closely related field.
- Strong Python programming skills and experience with deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch.
- Hands-on experience improving speech models or systems used in real-world applications.
- Deep understanding of modern ASR/STT architectures and decoding techniques.
- Experience evaluating and adapting models across accuracy, robustness, streaming behavior, latency, and compute cost.
- Track record of turning research ideas, papers, experiments, or emerging models into measurable product improvements.
- Experience building, deploying, and operating low-latency, production-grade ML or backend services in a cloud environment.
- Ability to set technical direction, communicate across disciplines, mentor engineers, and balance model quality, reliability, latency, and customer impact.

## Nice to Have
- Experience with streaming inference and observability.
- Experience with Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
- Background in research-heavy ML, backend/inference engineering, or both.

## Compensation
- California target base salary: $224,500–$256,000 USD.

## Similar jobs

- [Senior Machine Learning Engineer](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/c2b04718-b102-4765-ab70-ecbc4e50104e) - Ambience Healthcare - San Francisco, CA - $225k – $300k/yr
- [Senior AI Engineer, Agentic Data Enrichment](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/5246cc35-17f3-4041-a991-5cda61fcb0cf) - Baselayer - San Francisco, CA - $230k – $340k/yr
- [Senior Applied Scientist, Speech](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/fc2161b1-228d-49f4-ad53-dc2f66db10a8) - Otter - Mountain View, CA - $230k – $265k/yr
- [Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Ads](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/38a90e06-7152-474a-aaf0-bd106f198aee) - Reddit - Remote - $217k – $303k/yr
- [Senior Machine Learning Engineer II](https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/f137b594-66ba-4853-b8de-a4705ab39ba6) - Fetch - Remote - $211k – $249k/yr

**Apply:** https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/159f025f-dfce-49a3-907d-f922fdd04400
**Canonical:** https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/159f025f-dfce-49a3-907d-f922fdd04400