Sr. AI Engineer (AI/ML Inference)

Job description

**About Dialpad**Dialpad is the AI platform for customer experience, built to resolve customer problems in real time across voice and digital. Our AI agents learn from your best human agents and improve with every interaction, helping organizations understand their customers, deliver better experiences, increase operational efficiencies, and build a lasting competitive advantage. Unlike legacy systems built to route and answer, or standalone agentic bot vendors built to deflect, Dialpad was built to resolve. Our AI agents and human agents operate on a single platform with shared context, allowing Agentic AI to resolve issues, advance deals, and eliminate busywork through automation while seamlessly handing conversations to humans when needed, with full context preserved. Market-leading brands, including Randstad, Motorola Solutions, Netflix, the San Diego Padres, the Colorado Rockies Baseball Club, and Cal Athletics, trust Dialpad. Dialpad is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, GV, ICONIQ Capital, and T-Mobile. **Being a Dialer** At Dialpad, AI isn’t just a feature; it’s how our teams do their best work every day. We put powerful AI tools in every employee’s hands so they can move faster, think bigger, and achieve more. We believe every conversation matters. And we’ve built the platform that turns those conversations into insight and action, for our customers and ourselves. We look for people who are intensely curious and hold themselves to a high bar. Our ambition is significant, and achieving it requires a team that operates at the highest level. We seek individuals who embody our core traits: **Scrappy, Curious, Optimistic, Persistent, and Empathetic**. **Your role**As a Sr. AI Engineer: Systems, you’ll serve as an embedded senior back-end engineer on our Speech Team, owning the production systems that turn speech models and third-party capabilities into reliable, scalable experiences for Dialpad’s AI voice agents. You’ll work at the intersection of speech, ML infrastructure, and product engineering: productionizing models, enabling self-hosted inference, integrating external APIs, and building the operational foundations required for strong uptime and latency SLAs. You’ll partner closely with the MLOps (Inference) team while bringing deep ownership of the speech domain, helping the team move quickly from promising model or vendor capability to safe, observable, and cost-effective production. This role offers broad technical influence and the opportunity to shape how Dialpad operates real-time speech systems at scale. This position reports to our Senior Manager, AI Speech, and offers the opportunity to be based in our Canada Hub locations. **What you’ll do** - Productionization & Service Ownership: Own the path from speech model or third-party capability to production, building the APIs, services, deployment workflows, and integration layers that make it safe and easy for the Speech Team to ship improvements. - Self-Hosted Inference & Scaling: Productionize and operate self-hosted speech models, optimizing serving architecture, resource utilization, concurrency, autoscaling, and cost so they can meet the demands of real-time voice agents. - Third-Party APIs & Provider Resilience: Integrate and maintain third-party speech APIs behind durable abstractions, with clear failover, capacity planning, version management, and vendor-performance monitoring. - Reliability, SLOs & Observability: Build the monitoring, alerting, dashboards, health checks, and incident-response practices needed to meet uptime, latency, and quality SLAs for customer-facing speech systems. - Release & Evaluation Infrastructure: Partner with Speech and MLOps engineers to enable shadow traffic, staged rollouts, model and artifact versioning, rollback-safe releases, and candidate-versus-incumbent comparisons. - Cross-Functional Leadership & Mentorship: Work closely with the MLOps (Inference) team and partner teams across speech, platform, telephony, and product to set technical direction, mentor engineers, and turn model advances into reliable production impact. **Skills you’ll bring** - Systems & Backend Engineering: Strong software engineering fundamentals and proficiency in Python, plus experience designing maintainable APIs, services, and integration layers. We’re open to candidates who are strongest in backend/platform engineering or who have grown from ML into systems. - Production ML & Streaming: 5+ years of experience building or operating production software, including ML-backed systems, real-time services, speech applications, streaming media, or other latency-sensitive systems. - Model Serving & Inference: Hands-on experience deploying, scaling, and troubleshooting ML models in production, including model serving, inference optimization, resource management, and safe model and version rollouts. - Cloud & Distributed Systems: Experience with cloud infrastructure and distributed systems, as well as familiarity with containers, orchestration, service networking, CI/CD, and GCP. - Reliability & Operations: Strong understanding of observability, alerting, incident response, capacity planning, and availability and latency SLAs for customer-facing systems. - Cross-Functional Technical Leadership: Demonstrated ability to work closely with ML scientists, MLOps and inference engineers, and product teams, mentor teammates, and make pragmatic trade-offs across quality, reliability, latency, scale, and cost. For exceptional talent based in British Columbia, Canada the target base salary range for this position is posted below. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. The range displayed on each job posting reflects the *target* range for new hire salaries for the position. Within the range, individual pay is determined by work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for your preferred location during the hiring process. Please note that the compensation details listed in British Columbia role postings reflect the base salary only, and do not include bonus, equity, or benefits. British Columbia, Canada Salary Range $184,500—$213,750 CAD **Why Join Dialpad** - Work at the center of the AI transformation in business communications - Build and ship agentic AI products that are redefining how companies operate - Join a team where AI amplifies every employee’s impact - Competitive salary, comprehensive benefits, and real opportunities for growth We believe in investing in our people. Dialpad offers competitive benefits and perks, cutting-edge AI tools, and a robust training program that help you reach your full potential. We have designed our offices to be inclusive, offering a vibrant environment to cultivate collaboration and connection. Our exceptional culture, repeatedly recognized as a [Great Place to Work](https://www.greatplacetowork.com/certified-company/7007999#:~:text=91%25%20of%20employees%20at%20Dialpad,a%20typical%20U.S.-based%20company.&text=Source:%20Great%20Place%20To%20Work%C2%AE%202021%20Global%20Employee%20Engagement%20Study.&text=When%20you%20join%20the%20company,%20you%20are%20made%20to%20feel%20welcome.&text=People%20here%20are%20given%20a%20lot%20of%20responsibility), ensures that every employee feels valued and empowered to contribute to our collective success. Don’t meet every single requirement? If you’re excited about this role and possess the fundamental traits, drive, and strong ambition we seek, but your experience doesn’t meet every qualification, we encourage you to apply. *Dialpad is an equal-opportunity employer. We are dedicated to creating a community of inclusion and an environment free from discrimination or harassment.*