Salient builds AI agents for regulated financial services. Our agents automate loan servicing, compliance, collections, recovery, insurance claims, and disputes for banks, captives, and specialty lenders.
We are:
Backed by a16z and Y Combinator, with $75M raised in Series A funding
Cash flow positive and profitable, with mid eight figure ARR achieved in under two years
Already serving more than 20% of the auto lending industry
Processing millions of real customer calls and transactions every day
Fully deployed in production with major financial institutions
Actively expanding into new financial services segments
Building together in person in San Francisco
We are deeply integrated with our customers, own the full technology stack, and move quickly to bring modern AI into regulated industries where precision, reliability, and performance matter.
About the RoleWe're looking for an Infrastructure Engineer to architect and own the systems that power Salient at scale. This is a high-impact IC role focused on infrastructure engineering - you'll define how we build, deploy, and operate the infrastructure that processes millions of real financial transactions and customer interactions daily. You'll set the technical direction for reliability, scalability, and developer velocity across the stack to make sure the platform can support whatever we're building next.
Why us?We are one of the fastest-growing companies in the Voice AI space. We quadrupled our revenue last year and are now handling close to a million calls per day.
You’ll have an insane amount of ownership and be part of our journey as we undergo exponential growth, both in business and in engineering.
We are an AI-native company, constantly staying ahead of the curve in AI tooling and engineering best practices. You’ll play a direct role in driving this forward.
We have a no-BS culture that is hyper-focused on building a successful (and highly profitable) business.
Lead architectural decisions and technical reviews for infrastructure-critical initiatives.
Design, build, and own the cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP) that runs Salient - from compute and networking to storage and observability.
Develop scalable harnesses that enable coding agents to operate reliably without compromising system stability or code quality.
Partner closely with the modeling team to optimize the serving and performance of GPU-intensive workloads.
Drive reliability and performance across the stack by defining SLOs, building robust monitoring and alerting, and leading incident response and postmortems.
Own developer platform investments that materially improve engineering velocity, including CI/CD, deployment tooling, environments, and internal infrastructure abstractions.
Establish infrastructure best practices, patterns, and standards as a technical authority across the engineering org.
Identify and reduce technical debt across infrastructure systems, with a focus on long-term scalability and operational health.
5+ years of software engineering experience, with 2+ years at the senior or staff level in infrastructure/platform roles, working on large-scale distributed systems.
Deep expertise in cloud platforms (AWS or GCP) - compute, networking, storage, IAM, and cost optimization.
Expert in infrastructure-as-code, with a strong track record of building scalable automation systems.
Extensive experience owning and scaling Kubernetes and CI/CD systems in high-throughput, production environments.
Track record of building and operating high-availability, high-throughput distributed systems with mature observability practices.
Strong technical communication - able to document architecture clearly and influence engineering decisions across teams.
Background in security.
Exposure to serving AI/ML workloads.
Combination of big tech and startup experience.
At Salient, we’re building at the edge of AI - fast, focused, and with real ownership. Sprints and major launches move quickly, and we look for people who are energized by that pace. Our team typically works around 60 hours per week, beginning at 8:00 AM, with four days spent collaborating in person at our San Francisco office.
We also offer a benefits package designed to support our full-time employees: medical, dental, and vision coverage, a generous 401(k), and catered lunches.
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Skills Required
- 5+ years of software engineering experience
- 2+ years at senior or staff level in infrastructure roles
- Deep expertise in AWS or GCP
- Expert in infrastructure-as-code
- Extensive experience with Kubernetes and CI/CD systems
What We Do
At Salient, we’re rebuilding consumer loan servicing from the ground up - with agentic AI at the core. We started with auto lending, a $1.5 trillion industry and one of the most fragmented parts of financial services. We’re powering a more transparent, compliant, and consumer friendly future and seeking smart, driven and passionate colleagues to roll up their sleeves and join us in this mission. In under two years since launching: * We’ve grown to over $10M+ in ARR * Signed enterprise deals with some of the largest consumer lenders in the country * Reached over 2 million U.S. consumers, powering everything from payments to personalized support * Achieved cash flow positivity, giving us control over our own destiny * Raised $65M from top tier investors who believe in our long term vision * Processed more than $150M in loan payments and flagged $30M+ in fraud attempts using real-time AI systems * Identified over 35,000 compliance violations through automated regulatory intelligence
