About Dialpad
Dialpad is the AI platform for customer experience, built to resolve customer problems in real time across voice and digital. Our AI agents learn from your best human agents and improve with every interaction, helping organizations understand their customers, deliver better experiences, increase operational efficiencies, and build a lasting competitive advantage.
Unlike legacy systems built to route and answer, or standalone agentic bot vendors built to deflect, Dialpad was built to resolve. Our AI agents and human agents operate on a single platform with shared context, allowing Agentic AI to resolve issues, advance deals, and eliminate busywork through automation while seamlessly handing conversations to humans when needed, with full context preserved.
Market-leading brands, including Randstad, Motorola Solutions, Netflix, the San Diego Padres, the Colorado Rockies Baseball Club, and Cal Athletics, trust Dialpad. Dialpad is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, GV, ICONIQ Capital, and T-Mobile.
Being a Dialer
At Dialpad, AI isn’t just a feature; it’s how our teams do their best work every day. We put powerful AI tools in every employee’s hands so they can move faster, think bigger, and achieve more.
We believe every conversation matters. And we’ve built the platform that turns those conversations into insight and action, for our customers and ourselves.
We look for people who are intensely curious and hold themselves to a high bar. Our ambition is significant, and achieving it requires a team that operates at the highest level. We seek individuals who embody our core traits: Scrappy, Curious, Optimistic, Persistent, and Empathetic.
Your Role
As an AI Engineer on our Speech Team, you'll own the back-end implementation and linguistic optimization of the voice (TTS) layer for our next-generation AI agents. You'll work squarely within our Speech Team, a high-impact R&D and engineering group focused on speech recognition, enhancement, and synthesis; bridging core speech science and product engineering so our agents sound human, context-aware, and trustworthy.
You’ll build the systems that render voice: integrating and optimizing TTS engines, engineering the persona and parameter machinery, and exposing voice attributes to our customer-facing UI. You'll partner closely with our Voice Experience Designer, who authors and owns the persona standards and quality bar that you implement — you own the platform that makes their designs real, fast, and consistent at scale.
This position reports to our Sr. Manager, AI Speech, is based at our Vancouver hub, and operates on a hybrid schedule.
What you’ll do
- TTS backend implementation: Own the integration and optimization of multiple TTS vendor APIs behind a unified interface with failover, and lead research and prototyping of open-source and in-house TTS architectures.
- Latency & pipeline engineering: Minimize time-to-first-audio and end-to-end latency across the ASR → LLM → TTS pipeline while maintaining or optimizing voice quality, in partnership with ASR and Audio AI engineers.
- Linguistic optimization: Apply your knowledge of phonetics and sociolinguistics to format TTS input for maximum naturalness — SSML tags, punctuation-driven prosody, and text normalization for names, numbers, dates, and currency.
- Persona system & parameter exposure: Build the persona parameterization system and architect the logic that exposes voice attributes to the product UI, implementing the house standards defined by Agent Experience Design.
- Prompt engineering as code: Manage structured LLM and TTS prompt templates with versioning and a rigorous evaluation harness.
- Conversational turn design: Engineer context- and state-aware "thinking" utterances that maintain caller trust while tool calls and model steps run under the hood.
Skills you’ll bring
- Technical foundation: Strong Python and hands-on experience with deep learning frameworks (e.g. PyTorch).
- Speech expertise: 3+ years in Speech Synthesis (TTS) or applied speech ML, including hands-on work with frameworks like NVIDIA NeMo, ESPnet, or Coqui, and with major TTS APIs such as ElevenLabs, Rime, and Cartesia.
- Linguistic background: Degree in Computational Linguistics, Computer Science, or AI/ML, with a strong understanding of phonetics, prosody, and syntax you can apply in code (G2P, pronunciation dictionaries, text normalization).
- Backend engineering: Experience building production-grade APIs and integrating multi-vendor services in a cloud environment (GCP preferred).
- Evaluation mindset: Fluency with speech-quality metrics (MOS, intelligibility, latency) and the ability to design and execute rigorous A/B tests for voice personas.
- Prompt engineering: Proven experience crafting, versioning, and evaluating LLM prompts (system, few-shot) and structured templates.
This is a builder role in a science/infrastructure org. If your strength is conversation design or prompt-tuning without production engineering, our Lead Voice Experience (VX) Designer
role is likely the better fit.
For exceptional talent based in British Columbia, Canada the target base salary range for this position is posted below. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. The range displayed on each job posting reflects the target range for new hire salaries for the position. Within the range, individual pay is determined by work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for your preferred location during the hiring process. Please note that the compensation details listed in British Columbia role postings reflect the base salary only, and do not include bonus, equity, or benefits.
Why Join Dialpad
- Work at the center of the AI transformation in business communications
- Build and ship agentic AI products that are redefining how companies operate
- Join a team where AI amplifies every employee’s impact
- Competitive salary, comprehensive benefits, and real opportunities for growth
We believe in investing in our people. Dialpad offers competitive benefits and perks, cutting-edge AI tools, and a robust training program that help you reach your full potential. We have designed our offices to be inclusive, offering a vibrant environment to cultivate collaboration and connection. Our exceptional culture, repeatedly recognized as a Great Place to Work, ensures that every employee feels valued and empowered to contribute to our collective success.
Don’t meet every single requirement? If you’re excited about this role and possess the fundamental traits, drive, and strong ambition we seek, but your experience doesn’t meet every qualification, we encourage you to apply.
Dialpad is an equal-opportunity employer. We are dedicated to creating a community of inclusion and an environment free from discrimination or harassment.
Skills Required
- Strong Python programming skills and experience with deep learning frameworks (e.g., PyTorch).
- 3+ years of experience in Speech Synthesis (TTS) or Voice Design.
- Hands-on experience with TTS frameworks such as NVIDIA NeMo, ESPnet, or Coqui.
- Hands-on experience with major TTS APIs such as ElevenLabs, Rime, and Cartesia.
- Degree in Computational Linguistics, Computer Science, or AI/ML with deep understanding of phonetics, prosody, and syntax.
- Proven experience crafting and evaluating LLM prompts (system, few-shot) and managing structured prompt templates.
- Experience building production-grade APIs and integrating multi-vendor services in a cloud environment.
- Experience with GCP (preferred).
- Experience with SSML orchestration, pronunciation handling, and linguistic input formatting for TTS.
- Knowledge of speech quality metrics (MOS, intelligibility, latency) and ability to design rigorous A/B tests for voice personas.
- Experience integrating/optimizing multiple TTS vendor APIs and prototyping open-source or in-house TTS architectures.
Dialpad Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Dialpad and has not been reviewed or approved by Dialpad.
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Fair & Transparent Compensation — Compensation is viewed as competitive across many roles, combining salary, bonuses, equity, and benefits into a well-rounded package. Overall satisfaction with pay and total compensation is characterized as positive.
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Leave & Time Off Breadth — Paid time off is described as generous, with an unlimited PTO policy highlighted as a standout element. This breadth of time off is positioned as a central strength of the benefits package.
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Healthcare Strength — Healthcare coverage is characterized as comprehensive, spanning medical, dental, vision, disability, life insurance, and mental health benefits. Such coverage depth is presented as a core strength of the overall package.
Dialpad Insights
What We Do
Dialpad is a cloud-based business phone system that turns conversations into opportunities and helps global teams make smarter calls--anywhere, anytime. We bring simplicity to the professional phone experience and some of the world’s most innovative companies use our platform. Dialpad's products span video meetings, cloud call centers, sales coaching and dialers and enterprise phone systems--and are all infused with the latest AI technologies to help every business make smarter calls. Customers include WeWork, Uber, Motorola Solutions, Domo and Xero. Investors include Amasia, Andreessen Horowitz, Felicis Ventures, GV, ICONIQ Capital, Salesforce Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, Section 32, Softbank and Work-Bench.
