Applied AI Engineer

Salient is one of the fastest-growing AI startups in consumer finance. In less than two years, we’ve achieved product-market fit, scaled to 8-figure ARR, and emerged as one of the undisputed leaders in financial voice AI.

A few fast facts:

• Backed by YC and raised the largest Series A for a B2B startup from a16z

• Reached product-market fit in <2 years and scaled to 8-digit ARR

• 19-person team building a speech AI agent that handles millions of real customer calls per day, and fully deployed in production across major financial institutions (not just PoCs)

• We’re on a mission to pass the Turing test for conversational speech in a telephony setting

• In-person office culture in San Francisco, CA

About the Role

As an Applied AI Engineer at Salient, you'll work at the cutting edge of multimodal AI in financial services. You'll build systems that operate at massive scale, collaborating closely with our product and engineering teams.

Key areas of focus:

• Developing state-of-the-art multimodal AI systems, with particular focus on voice interactions

• Implementing robust safety and alignment frameworks for LLM-consumer interactions

• Building scalable monitoring systems to detect and escalate unexpected model behaviors

• Balancing rapid feature deployment with architectural scalability

• Ensuring AI systems comply with financial regulations and safety requirements

Requirements

• 3+ years of experience working directly with LLMs or voice AI technologies

• Deep expertise in modern LLM techniques (RAG, fine-tuning, prompt engineering)

• Experience with voice AI, ASR, and TTS technologies

• Track record of building and deploying production AI systems at scale

• Strong background in ML systems design and engineering best practices

• Excellence in cross-functional communication

• Experience implementing AI safety and monitoring frameworks

• Ability to work 4 days a week from our San Francisco office (open to candidates willing to relocate)

As an early-stage company building at the frontier of AI, we work with high intensity and commitment. While schedules can vary by role/team, many weeks will demand extra focus, flexibility and time particularly during major launches and high impact sprints. We're seeking those who are aligned to and able to commit to that expectation which includes 4 days per week in our San Francisco Office.