Manager, AI Engineering - Taco Bell Voice AI

Yum! • Irvine, CA

107d • $134,500 - $158,300

About The Position

We are hiring a Manager, AI Engineering to lead the development of intelligent voice agent behaviors for the Taco Bell Voice AI program. This role sits at the intersection of LLM prompt engineering, real-time orchestration, and applied AI system design. You’ll help craft agent logic, deploy optimized LLM and ASR-based components, and ensure the overall responsiveness and quality of the drive-thru AI experience. This role is ideal for a senior AI practitioner who thrives in high-velocity environments and is excited by the technical and creative challenges of voice-based AI systems.

Requirements

• 5+ years experience in AI Engineering, ML Systems, or LLM-driven development.
• Deep experience with LLMs (e.g. OpenAI, Llama, Nemotron, Mistral) and prompt-based application design.
• Strong coding skills in Python and experience with LangChain, vector stores, and API orchestration.
• Experience fine-tuning or adapting ASR, embedding, or LLM models in production.

Nice To Haves

• Familiarity with real-time audio systems and multi-turn conversational agents.
• Experience deploying LLM agents in customer-facing use cases.
• Understanding of speech interfaces, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and evaluation metrics.

Responsibilities

• Design, author, and maintain prompt chains, decision flows, and persona logic.
• Integrate LLMs with speech, menu data, POS systems, and structured knowledge sources.
• Lead the implementation of fallback logic, retry mechanisms, and safety filters.
• Fine-tune LLMs, ASR, and embedding models to optimize agent behavior and performance.
• Leverage techniques like LoRA, quantization, distillation, and pruning.
• Collaborate with MLEs to measure and reduce latency, response failure, and hallucination rates.
• Mentor AI Engineers and Data Scientists on prompt strategy and model tuning.
• Define evaluation workflows and scalable agent experimentation pipelines.
• Work cross-functionally with PMs, MLEs, QA, and voice platform teams to align priorities.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Number of Employees: 5,001-10,000 employees