Software Engineer, AI Research & Prototyping

Sage Care Inc • Palo Alto, CA

7d • $160,000 - $200,000

About The Position

Voice AI is moving fast. New models, new orchestration patterns, and new evaluation techniques appear every month, and some of them would make our agents meaningfully better. The hard part is knowing which ones, proving it with evidence, and getting that knowledge into the hands of the team. We are hiring a Software Engineer to own that pipeline from idea to evidence. You will stay close to what is emerging in the research community and the voice AI ecosystem, design experiments we can trust, and turn promising ideas into tested prototypes on real production data. Just as importantly, you will teach: every investigation you run ends in something the team can use, whether that is a benchmarked prototype, a technical deep-dive, or a clear recommendation with evidence behind it. This is not a research-for-publication role, and it is not a production ownership role. It is for someone who prototypes fast, measures honestly, and makes the people around them smarter.

Requirements

• 3+ years of software engineering or applied ML experience
• Strong Python skills; able to build and run your own experiments end-to-end without infrastructure support
• Hands-on experience with LLMs: prompting, evaluation, and an intuition for how model behavior changes across techniques and providers
• Experimental rigor: experience designing tests with controls, baselines, and honest measurement
• A track record of teaching or knowledge transfer in some form: teaching or TA experience, workshops, technical writing, internal tech talks, well-documented open source, or developer education
• Intellectual honesty: comfortable reporting that a promising idea did not work

Nice To Haves

• Advanced degree (MS/PhD) in CS, ML, or a related field, or equivalent research experience
• Experience with voice or speech systems (STT, TTS, real-time pipelines)
• Publications, technical blog posts, or open-source work we can read
• Experience taking a prototype through to production with an engineering team
• Experience evaluating AI systems in healthcare or other high-stakes domains

Responsibilities

• Track emerging techniques in voice AI, LLM reasoning, and agent systems, and identify which ones matter for us
• Design structured experiments with real controls: know when a result is signal and when it is noise
• Build rapid prototypes and test them against real conversation data
• Run head-to-head evaluations of models, providers, and techniques (reasoning approaches, speech models, orchestration patterns)
• Turn every investigation into a team-usable artifact: a benchmark, a written deep-dive, a tech talk, or a recommendation with evidence
• Work with platform engineers to hand off validated ideas for production implementation
• Build the internal knowledge base for how and why our AI stack works the way it does

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed