{"id":2982,"url":"https://alion.io/job/salient-applied-ai-engineer","title":"Applied AI Engineer","company":{"id":1054,"name":"Salient","domain":"trysalient.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/salient","size_band":null,"is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"C","score":68,"open_postings":15,"ghost_share":0.533,"stale_share":0,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-10-15T05:46:00Z"}},"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":["San Francisco, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":200000,"max":300000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":300000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"Post-training","optional":false},{"name":"Speech Recognition","optional":false},{"name":"Text-to-Speech","optional":false},{"name":"Voice Agents","optional":false},{"name":"World Models","optional":false},{"name":"AI Agents","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-05-20T22:56:41Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-05-20","last_verified_at":"2026-10-16T04:40:05Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":148,"trust":{"level":"ghost","repost_count":0,"flags":["stale","company_stale"],"days_open":148},"description":"About Us\nSalient 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.\nWe are:\nBacked by a16z and Y Combinator, with $75M raised in Series A funding\n\nCash flow positive and profitable, with mid eight figure ARR achieved in under two years\n\nAlready serving more than 20% of the auto lending industry\n\nProcessing millions of real customer calls and transactions every day\n\nFully deployed in production with major financial institutions\n\nActively expanding into new financial services segments\n\nBuilding together in person in San Francisco\n\nWe 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.\nAbout the Role\nWe’re looking for a Member of Technical Staff to help build the speech and language models behind Salient’s production voice agents.\nYou’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.\nThis is a high-ownership role on a small, elite team. You’ll own core parts of the system end to end, and everything you do will have direct revenue impact.\nWhat You’ll Do\nBuild and improve production speech models and systems with the ultimate goal of improving real-time conversational quality.\n\nPost-train LLMs for voice agents used for consumer finance.\n\nDevelop evals, harnesses, and monitoring systems.\n\nWork across models, data, infrastructure, and product to improve end-to-end agent quality.\n\nOwn major technical areas with significant autonomy, from problem definition to production deployment.\n\nWhat We’re Looking For\nStrong engineering fundamentals and ability to build reliable production systems.\n\nExperience with speech modeling, or LLM post-training.\n\nFamiliarity with areas such as ASR, TTS, turn detection, speech enhancement, multilingual speech, LLM post-training, or model evaluation.\n\nAbility to diagnose messy real-world model failures and turn them into practical improvements.\n\nHigh ownership, strong execution speed, and comfort operating in ambiguous technical areas.\n\nPrior 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.\n\nExceptional engineers who are highly driven and excited to work on hard AI problems are encouraged to apply!\n\nWhy Join\nWork on the full stack of production voice AI.\n\nOwn and lead core product areas on a small, high-caliber team.\n\nShip improvements that affect millions of live conversations.\n\nTackle real-world speech problems that are still unsolved outside of benchmarks.\n\nAt Salient, we’re building at the edge of AI - fast, focused, and with real ownership. Sprints and major launches move quickly, and we look for people who are energized by that pace. Our team typically works around 60 hours per week, beginning at 8:00 AM, with four days spent collaborating in person at our San Francisco office.\nWe also offer a benefits package designed to support our full-time employees: medical, dental, and vision coverage, a generous 401(k), and catered lunches.\nBy applying, you acknowledge that your personal information will be processed in accordance with our Privacy Policy.","description_format":"text","description_chars":3445,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Financial Software & Embedded Finance","Debt Collection & Recovery","Financial AI"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-05-20T22:56:41Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":4,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.125,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":147,"expected_fill_days":21,"reasons":["conf:3","stale_co","velocity","ghost","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-10-15T05:46:00Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":300000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/salient-applied-ai-engineer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/salient-applied-ai-engineer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-16T05:15:00Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":2435,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-17T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":1054},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=1054"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fsalient-applied-ai-engineer"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fsalient-applied-ai-engineer"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fsalient-applied-ai-engineer"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/salient-applied-ai-engineer\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fsalient-applied-ai-engineer"}]}