# Applied AI Engineer at Salient

- Company: Salient
- What the company does: Salient automates collections, servicing, regulatory audit, insurance claims, and dispute resolution for consumer lenders. Backed by Y Combinator and a16z.
- Company website: https://www.trysalient.com
- Type: Startups (AI role)
- Level: Mid level
- Location: SF Headquarters
- Work setup: On-site
- Pay: $200K to $300K base salary per year (USD)
- Posted: 2026-05-20
- Apply by: 2026-10-08
- Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/salient/5bef27e7-17b3-4ad0-93e0-9e430409acd4
- Page: https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/salient-applied-ai-engineer/

## 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

Tags: Applied AI