Senior AI Engineer (Edge Dialog Systems)
BrightAI - Palo Alto, CA
Hiring: Senior AI Engineer (Edge Dialog Systems) Company: BrightAI Location: Palo Alto, CA Job Posted Time: 2026-09-16 12:27:45 Employment Type: Full-time / Hybrid Target Skills & Keywords : Deep Learning, Docker, Embedded Systems, Fine-tuning, Firmware, Git, LLM, Linux, Machine Learning, NLP, ONNX, Python, RAG, Systems Engineering, pytest About the job Experience: •5+ years of experience in ML/AI, with a strong focus on NLP, LLMs, or conversational AI. Required Skills: •Own the on-device dialog pipeline end to end: intent routing, hybrid intent classification (pattern matching combined with embedding similarity and out-of-domain detection), text normalization for noisy speech input, and the multi-step guided-procedure engine. •Maintain and extend the deterministic safety layer that wraps the language model—confirmation and echo-back gating, criticality tagging, negation handling—so that a misheard answer on a safety-critical step cannot pass silently. •Run SLM inference on-device under memory, computational complexity, and latency budgets, and reduce the per-turn inference cost through model selection, quantization, and runtime optimization. •Preserve and extend the zero-shot configuration model, in which new device commands and customer procedures are authored as data rather than released as code, so that a new customer can be onboarded in hours rather than weeks. •Coordinate the device deployment pipeline with the edge team •Maintain the API contract with on-device voice pipeline & its speech-to-text (STT) stack. •Define and run on-device benchmarks: latency, accuracy, and false-accept/reject rates on safety-critical steps; use measurements to drive engineering decisions. •Build and maintain golden datasets and a non-regression suite, and use them as the release gate as the command and procedure catalogs grow. Qualifications: •LLM and retrieval foundation — the baseline for this role •Strong applied experience with LLMs: prompting, structured output, tool and function calling, evaluation, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) – together with the judgment to recognize when a model should not be used at all. •Solid command of embeddings and semantic similarity (e.g., cosine similarity, centroid versus maximum-similarity strategies, threshold tuning, and out-of-domain detection). •Strong Python with the ability to write clean, tested, reviewable code. Fluent with pytest, and Git and has CI discipline. •Edge Dialog Systems Engineering — What This Role Additionally Requires •Strong experience building edge conversational systems, including multi-turn dialog/state management and efficient intent/NLU pipelines using local-first, cheap-to-expensive inference strategies. •Disambiguation and repair: resolving ambiguous intent and noisy spoken references, and asking a clarifying question or re-prompting rather than committing to a confident wrong answer. •Comfort placing deterministic guardrails around a probabilistic model, including safety floors, confirmation gating, and negation handling, and experience with state-machine or workflow engines covering branching, variable capture, and resumability. •Practical embedded development workflow: Linux, Docker, adb, systemd services, and the ability to diagnose problems from device logs. •The ability to take ownership of an existing, non-trivial codebase and keep it healthy. Interested candidates, please apply directly through the job posting on company's career page or try via AI auto apply on this platform. Don't miss this opportunity to join a forward-thinking team!