{"id":1232600,"url":"https://alion.io/job/palona-ai-modeling-engineer","title":"AI Modeling Engineer","company":{"id":1902514,"name":"Palona","domain":"palona.ai","url":"https://alion.io/company/palona","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Workable","truth_index":null},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":null,"employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Los Altos, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":142000,"max_usd":309000,"period":"year","method":"role_country_seniority_unknown","sample_n":2986},"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":true,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Fine-tuning","optional":false},{"name":"Hugging Face","optional":false},{"name":"JAX","optional":false},{"name":"Knowledge Distillation","optional":false},{"name":"LLM Evaluation","optional":false},{"name":"LLM Guardrails","optional":false},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Model Distillation","optional":false},{"name":"Multimodal AI","optional":false},{"name":"Post-training","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"PyTorch","optional":false},{"name":"Speech Recognition","optional":false},{"name":"Structured Outputs","optional":false},{"name":"Text-to-Speech","optional":false},{"name":"Tool Use","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-08-11T00:00:00Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-08-11","last_verified_at":"2026-09-28T14:44:04Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":49,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":49},"description":"Palona’s AI agents operate in real restaurant environments: noisy phone lines, varied accents, complex menus, interruptions, incomplete information, strict business rules, and customers who expect an immediate, natural response. Improving these systems requires more than selecting the newest model. It requires disciplined evaluation, high-quality data, modeling judgment, experimentation, and production feedback loops.\nWe are looking for an applied AI Modeling Engineer to improve the intelligence, accuracy, safety, latency, and cost of Palona’s voice and multimodal agents. You will own problems across model selection and routing, prompting and context, fine-tuning or post-training when justified, speech and language quality, evaluation methodology, dataset development, and model behavior in production.\nThis is a product-facing modeling role. Research depth matters, but success is measured by improvements that survive contact with production and create better guest, restaurant, and business outcomes. You will work closely with product, full-stack, infrastructure, and customer-facing engineers to move from hypothesis to experiment to reliable deployment.\nWhat you’ll own\nDevelop modeling and experimentation strategies for high-impact agent problems in voice, language, reasoning, ordering, multilingual behavior, and multimodal understanding.\nBuild rigorous offline and online evaluations that measure task completion, accuracy, safety, latency, cost, conversational quality, and business outcomes.\nCreate and maintain representative datasets from simulations, human annotation, production feedback, and difficult edge cases while protecting sensitive data.\nEvaluate frontier and open-source models and make clear build, buy, route, prompt, fine-tune, or distill decisions.\nImprove prompting, context construction, memory, tool-use policies, structured outputs, model routing, and fallback behavior.\nDesign fine-tuning, preference optimization, distillation, or other post-training work when it offers a measurable advantage over simpler methods.\nPartner with speech and real-time engineers to improve ASR, TTS, turn-taking, interruption handling, pronunciation, multilingual behavior, and end-to-end latency.\nDevelop analysis tools that explain model failures, slice performance by scenario, detect regressions, and accelerate iteration.\nShip model changes with production guardrails, staged rollouts, monitoring, rollback paths, and clear quality gates.\nTranslate new research and model releases into concrete product opportunities and communicate tradeoffs to technical and non-technical partners.\nRaise scientific and engineering standards through reproducible experiments, thoughtful reviews, and clear documentation.\nRequirements\n3+ years of industrial experience in relevant technical domain.\nStrong machine learning foundations and hands-on experience developing or evaluating production AI systems.\nStrong Python skills and experience with modern ML tooling such as PyTorch, JAX, Hugging Face, or equivalent systems.\nPractical experience with LLMs, speech models, multimodal models, or agentic systems.\nAbility to design reliable experiments, define useful metrics, analyze noisy results, and avoid optimizing against weak proxies.\nExperience building datasets, evaluation harnesses, model services, or training and inference pipelines.\nStrong software engineering judgment; your work is reproducible, tested, observable, and usable by other engineers.\nAbility to connect modeling choices to product constraints including latency, cost, privacy, safety, and user experience.\nComfort operating in ambiguity and collaborating across research, engineering, product, and customer contexts.\nAI-native working habits and genuine curiosity about new model capabilities and limitations.\nBenefits\nCompetitive Salary and Stock Option Plan.\nMedical, dental, vision, retirement, leave, and disability benefits as applicable.\nFamily Leave\nShort Term & Long Term Disability\nPaid time off and company holidays.\nLearning and development support.","description_format":"text","description_chars":4054,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Parental leave"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Corporate Events"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-25T15:23:28Z"}],"liveness":{"score":24,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.428,"p_room":0.55,"age_days":48,"expected_fill_days":40,"reasons":["conf:5","win:tail"],"computed_at":"2026-09-28T05:45:00Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/palona-ai-modeling-engineer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/palona-ai-modeling-engineer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-09-29T02:29:35Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","usage":{"tier":"crawler","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":2249,"day_limit":5000,"remaining_today":2751,"minute_limit":60,"resets_at":"2026-09-30T00:00:00Z"}}}