Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. AppFolio is an AI-native software platform transforming the real estate and property management industry through intelligent products and workflows. The Senior Machine Learning Engineer will design and ship production voice and conversational AI agents, optimize real-time agent pipelines for latency and cost, and lead collaboration across ML, platform, product, and voice teams.

Responsibilities

• Ship Voice & Text Agents: Architect and ship voice and text agent pipelines that handle real-time, multi-turn customer interactions
• Reasoning vs. Latency: Make principled trade-offs between reasoning depth and latency across frontier LLMs, smaller models, and routing strategies
• Lead a Pod: Lead a small pod of ML and platform engineers; raise the bar on agent evaluation, observability, and incident response
• Define Quality: Partner with Product and Voice channel teams to define KPIs, eval harnesses, and acceptance criteria for agent quality
• Optimize for Voice: Drive selective Small Language Model (SLM) fine-tuning and inference optimization for voice latency and cost

Skills

• * You have shipped production AI agents serving real users in voice and/or text channels
• * You think in pipelines and systems, not just models
• * You move fast, deliver impact, and maintain sound engineering judgment
• * You are humble, collaborative, and low-ego, and you elevate those around you
• * You value work-life balance as a foundation for sustained high performance
• * Agent frameworks: Deep, shipped experience with LangChain, LangGraph, LangSmith, and LangChain Deep Agents (or equivalent agent frameworks)
• * Voice stack: Hands-on with Voice-to-Voice models and traditional TTS / STT pipelines; understands the trade-offs between end-to-end voice models and modular STT → LLM → TTS architectures
• * LLM fluency: Strong grasp of LLM reasoning behavior, tool use, structured output, and reasoning-vs-latency trade-offs across providers
• * Telephony & cloud: Production experience with Twilio (or comparable telephony) and AWS
• * Engineering: Expert Python, async programming, and WebSockets for real-time, bidirectional streaming
• * ML fundamentals: Solid foundation in deep learning, model evaluation, and inference optimization; able to deploy with Docker on AWS
• * Leadership: Demonstrated ability to lead a small team, mentor engineers, and partner credibly with Product and Design
• * Experience fine-tuning Small Language Models for domain-specific voice applications
• * Familiarity with RAG over structured business data and tool-using agents over API surfaces
• * Prior experience in regulated or customer-facing industries with strict reliability requirements
• * Publicly verifiable work on GitHub, in open-source agent frameworks, or in community competitions

Benefits

• Discretionary bonuses you may be eligible for based on your role and/or employment type.
• Coaching and mentorship with best-in-class leaders.
• Time and tools to develop your skills.
• Hybrid work with a flexible, personal, and connected environment.

Company Overview

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