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Salient builds AI agents for regulated financial services, automating loan servicing, compliance, collections, recovery, insurance claims, and disputes for banks and specialty lenders. The company is backed by a16z and Y Combinator with $75M in Series A funding, is cash-flow positive with mid-eight-figure ARR, and serves over 20% of the auto lending industry while processing millions of real customer calls daily.
You will own the voice platform infrastructure behind Salient's AI agents, including the SIP edge, Asterisk deployment, voice audio and dialing layers, and call servers connecting borrowers to agents. This is a hands-on ownership role where you will complete work in flight, make the platform reliable and safe to change, and prepare it for the next order of magnitude in call volume.
Key responsibilities include:
- Finishing the Asterisk migration by cutting over remaining customers, trunks, and call flows with zero regression, then retiring the legacy path
- Ensuring reliability of voice audio and dialing layers through SLOs, monitoring, incident response, and eliminating recurring failure modes
- Implementing zero-downtime call-server deployments with draining, graceful shutdown, safe rollout, and rollback without dropping live calls
- Building tools to manage Kamailio and Asterisk reconfiguration without server restarts inside Kubernetes
- Designing backpressure, load shedding, and self-recovery mechanisms when carriers, media, or AI dependencies degrade
- Conducting load testing and capacity planning for thousands of concurrent calls and CPS at the SIP edge
- Developing voice observability including call-quality and platform-health metrics, alerting, runbooks, and postmortems
- Securing the voice edge against scanning, toll fraud, and abuse
- Building customer telephony integrations including custom SIP trunks (e.g., Genesys, Bandwidth), call transfers, SIP header passing, and API prototypes
- Creating self-serve setup through productized trunk configurations, validation tooling, and documentation
You will work directly with AI agent engineers, telephony specialists, customer success teams, and carriers. The team typically works around 60 hours per week, beginning at 8:00 AM, with four days spent collaborating in person at the San Francisco office.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Production voice infrastructure experience at meaningful scale with on-call responsibilities
- Deep knowledge of SIP, SDP, and RTP with ability to debug from traces and pcaps
- Ability to debug EC2/Kubernetes networking issues and develop monitoring/testing plans to minimize call drops
- Understanding of real-time media, WebRTC, and latency budgets
- Experience designing for backpressure, graceful degradation, and safe deployment of stateful services
- Track record building load tests that identified real bottlenecks before customers encountered them
- Strong technical writing skills for design docs, runbooks, and postmortems
- Experience integrating SIP trunks with customer contact centers and carriers, including transfers and header passing
NICE TO HAVE:
- Experience with Kamailio, Asterisk, OpenSIPS, FreeSWITCH, or rtpengine
- Regional failover experience for SIP
- Latency-aware multi-homing experience
- Contact-center, dialer, CpaaS, or carrier infrastructure background
- AI voice agents, speech pipelines, or regulated industry (lending) experience
- Familiarity with contact-center platforms such as Genesys, Five9, NICE, or Amazon Connect
