Member of Technical Staff, Applied AI – Speech

The role

You will help build speech-to-speech and real-time voice models for Salient's production voice agents. The work covers full-duplex conversation, streaming inference, neural codecs, and evals that reflect real borrower calls.

What you will do

• Design, train, and ship speech-to-speech and real-time voice models that improve live call quality: latency, turn-taking, naturalness, robustness, and interruption handling.
• Build and improve the production speech stack: neural codecs, streaming inference, ASR/TTS or speech-to-speech pathways, turn detection, and speech enhancement.
• Develop evals, harnesses, and monitoring that reflect real borrower conversations, not just clean benchmarks.
• Diagnose real-world failures such as telephony noise, barge-in, accent and channel variation, and overlapping speech, and turn them into shipped improvements.
• Work across models, data, infrastructure, and product with the Applied AI and Voice AI teams to raise end-to-end agent quality.
• Own major technical areas with significant autonomy, from problem definition to production deployment.

Required qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in speech, audio, or related machine learning, or equivalent demonstrated depth through shipped systems and public work.
• Proven work on speech-to-speech, full-duplex, or other real-time conversational speech systems, not only offline ASR or TTS in isolation.
• Public proof of work: papers, GitHub repositories, Hugging Face models or datasets, or other artifacts that can be inspected.
• Strong engineering fundamentals and the ability to build reliable production systems, including streaming or low-latency inference.
• 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.

Nice to have

• Deep experience with neural audio codecs, vocoders, or discrete speech representations used in modern speech-to-speech stacks.
• Experience with turn detection, barge-in, speech enhancement, or multilingual speech in production telephony or contact-center settings.
• Experience post-training or adapting language models for voice agents, and building evals that predict production quality.
• Familiarity with the constraints of regulated or high-stakes conversations, where errors have real consequences.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision coverage.
• A generous 401(k).
• Catered lunches.
• Equity as part of compensation.

Before you apply

• Benefits will be confirmed for the country you are hired in.
• Salient says it looks for evidence of shipped speech systems and technical depth more than a particular job title.

About the company

Salient builds AI agents for regulated financial services, automating loan servicing, compliance, collections, recovery, insurance claims, and disputes for banks, captives, and specialty lenders. It is backed by a16z and Y Combinator, with $75M raised in Series A funding.