Startups · AI

Applied AI Engineer

Salient · SF Headquarters · On-site

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About Salient

Salient automates collections, servicing, regulatory audit, insurance claims, and dispute resolution for consumer lenders. Backed by Y Combinator and a16z.

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.

What they'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
More about this role

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.

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

Cash flow positive and profitable, with mid 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.

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...

Read the full posting on Salient's site ↗

Applied AI

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