Palona AI

AI Modeling Engineer

Palona AI
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29 days ago
Toronto, Canada +2 moreMid Level

Responsibilities

  • Develop modeling and experimentation strategies for voice, language, reasoning, ordering, multilingual, and multimodal agent problems.
  • Build offline and online evaluations measuring task completion, accuracy, safety, latency, cost, conversational quality, and business outcomes.
  • Create and maintain representative datasets from simulations, human annotation, production feedback, and edge cases while protecting sensitive data.
  • Evaluate frontier and open-source models and make 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, and other post-training work when justified by measurable results.
  • 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 for model failures, scenario-based performance slicing, regression detection, and faster iteration.
  • Ship model changes with production guardrails, staged rollouts, monitoring, rollback paths, and quality gates.
  • Translate research and model releases into product opportunities and communicate tradeoffs across technical and non-technical teams.

Requirements

  • At least 3 years of industrial experience in a 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, or Hugging Face.
  • Practical experience with LLMs, speech models, multimodal models, or agentic systems.
  • Ability to design reliable experiments, define useful metrics, analyze noisy results, and avoid weak proxies.
  • Experience building datasets, evaluation harnesses, model services, or training and inference pipelines.
  • Strong software engineering judgment, including reproducible, tested, observable, and reusable work.
  • Ability to connect modeling decisions to latency, cost, privacy, safety, and user experience constraints.
  • Ability to collaborate across research, engineering, product, and customer contexts.
  • 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 and long-term disability benefits.
  • Paid time off and company holidays.
  • Learning and development support.
  • Full-time, on-site role in Los Altos, United States.

Tech Stack

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Palona AI

About Palona AI

11-50 employees
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