AI Engineer, Agentic Voice at Dialpad. 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

- Location: Vancouver, Canada
- Engagement: Hybrid
- Team: Speech Team

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 perks.
- 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.

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📌 AI Engineer, Agentic Voice (Vancouver)
🏢 Dialpad
📍 Vancouver