Palona's AI agents operate in real restaurant environments: noisy phone lines, varied accents, complex menus, interruptions, incomplete information, strict business rules, and customers who expect an immediate, natural response. Improving these systems requires more than selecting the newest model. It requires disciplined evaluation, high-quality data, modeling judgment, experimentation, and production feedback loops.

We are looking for an applied AI Modeling Engineer to improve the intelligence, accuracy, safety, latency, and cost of Palona's voice and multimodal agents. You will own problems across model selection and routing, prompting and context, fine-tuning or post-training when justified, speech and language quality, evaluation methodology, dataset development, and model behavior in production. This is a product-facing modeling role.

Research depth matters, but success is measured by improvements that survive contact with production and create better guest, restaurant, and business outcomes. You will work closely with product, full-stack, infrastructure, and customer-facing engineers to move from hypothesis to experiment to reliable deployment. What You'll Own Develop modeling and experimentation strategies for high-impact agent problems in voice, language, reasoning, ordering, multilingual behavior, and multimodal understanding

Build rigorous offline and online evaluations that measure task completion, accuracy, safety, latency, cost, conversational quality, and business outcomes

Create and maintain representative datasets from simulations, human annotation, production feedback, and difficult edge cases while protecting sensitive data

Evaluate frontier and open-source models and make clear build, buy, route, prompt, fine-tune, or distill decisions

Improve prompting, context construction, memory, tool-use policies, structured outputs, model routing, and fallback behavior

Design fine-tuning, preference optimization, distillation,



or other post-training work when it offers a measurable advantage over simpler methods

Partner with speech and real-time engineers to improve ASR, TTS, turn-taking, interruption handling, pronunciation, multilingual behavior, and end-to-end latency

Develop analysis tools that explain model failures, slice performance by scenario, detect regressions, and accelerate iteration

Ship model changes with production guardrails, staged rollouts, monitoring, rollback paths, and clear quality gates

Translate new research and model releases into concrete product opportunities and communicate tradeoffs to technical and non-technical partners

Raise scientific and engineering standards through reproducible experiments, thoughtful reviews, and transparent documentation Requirements 3+ years of industrial experience in relevant technical domain

Strong machine learning foundations and hands-on experience developing or evaluating production AI systems

Strong Python skills and experience with modern ML tooling such as PyTorch, JAX, Hugging Face, or equivalent systems

Practical experience with LLMs, speech models, multimodal models, or agentic systems

Ability to design reliable experiments, define useful metrics, analyze noisy results, and avoid optimizing against weak proxies

Experience building datasets, evaluation harnesses, model services, or training and inference pipelines

Strong software engineering judgment; your work is reproducible, tested, observable, and usable by other engineers

Ability to connect modeling choices to product constraints including latency, cost, privacy, safety, and user experience

Comfort operating in ambiguity and collaborating across research, engineering, product, and customer contexts

AI-native working habits and genuine curiosity about new model capabilities and limitations Benefits Competitive Salary and Stock Option Plan

Medical, dental, vision, retirement, leave, and disability benefits as applicable

Family Leave

Short Term & Long Term Disability

Paid time off and company holidays

Learning and development support

📌 AI Modeling Engineer (Toronto)
🏢 Palona AI
📍 Toronto