Applied AI Engineer

Job Description

Job Description

About Us

Salient builds AI agents for regulated financial services. Our agents automate loan servicing, compliance, collections, recovery, insurance claims, and disputes for banks, captives, and specialty lenders.

We are:

• Backed by a16z and Y Combinator, with $75M raised in Series A funding

• Cash flow positive and profitable, with eight figure ARR achieved in under two years

• Already serving more than 20% of the auto lending industry

• Processing millions of real customer calls and transactions every day

• Fully deployed in production with major financial institutions

• Actively expanding into new financial services segments

• Building together in person in San Francisco

We are deeply integrated with our customers, own the full technology stack, and move quickly to bring modern AI into regulated industries where precision, reliability, and performance matter.

About the Role

We’re looking for a Member of Technical Staff to help build the speech and language models behind Salient’s production voice agents.

You’ll work on challenging problems in speech and language modeling. Many of these problems look solved in academic benchmarks, but remain deeply unsolved in real-world production.

This is a high-ownership role on a small, elite team. You’ll own core parts of the system end to end, and everything you do will have direct revenue impact.

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.

At Salient, we’re building at the edge of AI - fast, focused, and with real ownership. Sprints and major launches move quickly, and we look for people who are energized by that pace and ready to collaborate in person 4 days a week in our San Francisco office with a start time of 8:00 AM .

We also offer a benefits package designed to support our full-time employees: medical, dental, and vision coverage , a generous 401(k) , and catered lunches .

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Compensation Range: $200K - $300K