AI Engineer, Agentic Voice

About the role

You will lead the backend development and linguistic refinement of the voice synthesis layer for our next-generation AI agents. This position focuses on bridging speech science and product engineering to ensure our agents sound natural, context-aware, and reliable.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Integrate and optimize various TTS vendor APIs behind a unified interface with failover capabilities.
• Conduct research and prototyping for open-source and internal TTS architectures.
• Minimize end-to-end latency across the ASR, LLM, and TTS pipeline while maintaining audio quality.
• Apply phonetics and sociolinguistics to improve TTS output using SSML tags, prosody, and normalization for dates, numbers, and currency.
• Build persona parameterization systems and architect logic to expose voice attributes to the UI.
• Manage versioned LLM and TTS prompt templates using a structured evaluation harness.
• Design conversational utterances that maintain user trust during background model processing.

Requirements

• 3+ years of experience in Speech Synthesis (TTS) or applied speech machine learning.
• Proficiency in Python and deep learning frameworks like PyTorch.
• Hands-on experience with tools such as NVIDIA NeMo, ESPnet, or Coqui.
• Experience with major TTS APIs including ElevenLabs, Rime, and Cartesia.
• Degree in Computer Science, Computational Linguistics, or AI/ML.
• Understanding of phonetics, prosody, and syntax, including G2P and pronunciation dictionaries.
• Experience building production-grade APIs and integrating multi-vendor services in cloud environments (GCP preferred).
• Ability to design A/B tests for voice personas using metrics like MOS, intelligibility, and latency.
• Proven experience in crafting and versioning LLM prompts.

Skills & tools

• Python, PyTorch
• NVIDIA NeMo, ESPnet, Coqui
• ElevenLabs, Rime, Cartesia
• SSML, G2P
• GCP
• LLM prompting

Practical notes

• Salary range for British Columbia: $161,500 to $191,500 CAD base salary.
• Compensation excludes bonus, equity, and benefits.
• This is a production engineering role; candidates focused solely on conversation design or prompt-tuning should apply to the Lead Voice Experience Designer role instead.