AI Engineer

Dialpad•Vancouver, BC

8d•CA$161,500 - CA$191,500•Hybrid

About The Position

As an AI Engineer: Voice Designer, you’ll own the back-end implementation and linguistic optimization of the Text-to-Speech (TTS) layer for our next-generation AI voice agents. You’ll work squarely within our Speech Team—a high-impact R&D and engineering group focused on speech recognition, enhancement, and synthesis. You will bridge the gap between core speech science and product engineering, ensuring our voice agents sound human, context-aware, and trustworthy. You’ll also help create the systems that manage voice personas, tone, and conversational fillers, eventually exposing these as tweakable parameters to our customer-facing UI. This position reports to our Senior Manager, AI Speech, is based at our Vancouver hub, and operates on a hybrid schedule.

Requirements

Strong Python programming skills and experience with deep learning frameworks (e.g. PyTorch).
3+ years of experience in Speech Synthesis (TTS) or Voice Design, including hands-on work with frameworks like NVIDIA NeMo, ESPnet, or Coqui, and hands-on experience with major TTS APIs such as ElevenLabs, Rime, and Cartesia.
Degree in Computational Linguistics, Computer Science, or AI/ML with a deep understanding of phonetics, prosody, and syntax.
Proven experience crafting and evaluating LLM prompts (system, few-shot) and managing structured prompt templates.
Experience building production-grade APIs and integrating multi-vendor services in a cloud environment (GCP preferred).
Knowledge of speech quality metrics (MOS, intelligibility, latency) and the ability to design rigorous A/B tests for voice personas.

Responsibilities

Own the integration and optimization of multiple TTS vendor APIs while leading research and prototyping for open-source or in-house TTS architectures.
Apply expertise in phonetics and sociolinguistics to ensure TTS input is formatted for maximum naturalness, including SSML orchestration and pronunciation handling.
Craft context-specific utterances to optimize turn handling and build caller trust during agentic "thought" processes.
Design and manage LLM and TTS prompts and parameters to define and refine agent personalities across different industry verticals.
Architect the logic to expose voice attributes (speed, pitch, tone, style) to the product UI, allowing customers to customize their agent’s voice profile.
Partner with ASR and Audio AI engineers to ensure end-to-end voice quality and minimize latency in the ASR → LLM → TTS pipeline.