# Applied AI Engineer
**Company:** [Salient](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/salient)
**Location:** San Francisco, CA
**Salary:** $200K-$300K
**Experience:** 0+ years
**Skills:** Speech Modeling, Llm Post-Training, Asr, Tts, Speech Enhancement, Model Evaluation, Production Systems, Evals And Monitoring, Python, Machine Learning
**Posted:** 2026-05-20
> Member of Technical Staff building production speech and language models for voice AI agents in financial services. Own core modeling, evals, and deployment on a small team with high autonomy and real revenue impact.
## Job Description
## What You’ll Do
- Build and improve production speech models and systems with the ultimate goal of improving real-time conversational quality.
- Post-train LLMs for voice agents used for consumer finance.
- Develop evals, harnesses, and monitoring systems.
- Work across models, data, infrastructure, and product to improve end-to-end agent quality.
- Own major technical areas with significant autonomy, from problem definition to production deployment.

## What We’re Looking For
- Strong engineering fundamentals and ability to build reliable production systems.
- Experience with speech modeling, or LLM post-training.
- Familiarity with areas such as ASR, TTS, turn detection, speech enhancement, multilingual speech, LLM post-training, or model evaluation.
- Ability to diagnose messy real-world model failures and turn them into practical improvements.
- High ownership, strong execution speed, and comfort operating in ambiguous technical areas.
- Prior experience in speech modeling and LLM post-training is ideal, but not required. We care more about slope, intensity, and technical ability than exact background. Exceptional engineers who are highly driven and excited to work on hard AI problems are encouraged to apply!

## Why Join
- Work on the full stack of production voice AI.
- Own and lead core product areas on a small, high-caliber team.
- Ship improvements that affect millions of live conversations.
- Tackle real-world speech problems that are still unsolved outside of benchmarks.
- Collaborate in person 4 days a week in our San Francisco office with a start time of 8:00 AM.
- Benefits: medical, dental, and vision coverage, a generous 401(k), and catered lunches.
**Apply:** https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/applied-ai-engineer-at-salient-aedd16e0-9115-4dc0-a1c7-1e1819313ce0
**Canonical:** https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/applied-ai-engineer-at-salient-aedd16e0-9115-4dc0-a1c7-1e1819313ce0