Member of Technical Staff, Applied AI – Speech

Responsibilities

• Design, train, and ship speech-to-speech and real-time voice models for live calls
• Build and improve the production speech stack: neural codecs, streaming inference, turn detection, speech enhancement
• Develop evals and monitoring reflecting real borrower conversations
• Diagnose real-world failures such as telephony noise, barge-in, and overlapping speech
• Work across models, data, infrastructure, and product to raise end-to-end agent quality
• Own major technical areas from problem definition to production deployment

Requirements

• 5+ years in speech, audio, or related machine learning, or demonstrated depth through shipped systems
• Proven work on speech-to-speech, full-duplex, or real-time conversational speech systems
• Public proof of work such as papers, GitHub repositories, or Hugging Face models
• Strong engineering fundamentals and reliable low-latency production systems
• Ability to diagnose messy real-world model failures
• High ownership and comfort in ambiguous technical areas

Preferred Qualifications

• Neural audio codecs, vocoders, or discrete speech representations
• Turn detection, barge-in, speech enhancement, or multilingual speech in telephony
• Post-training or adapting language models for voice agents
• Familiarity with regulated or high-stakes conversations

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision coverage
• 401(k)
• Catered lunches
• Equity

About the Company

• Salient builds AI agents for regulated financial services, automating loan servicing, compliance, collections, and disputes. Backed by a16z and Y Combinator, it is headquartered in San Francisco.