• Manager, AI Engineering - Taco Bell Voice AI

    Taco Bell (Irvine, CA)


    We are hiring a Manager, AI Engineering to lead the development of intelligent voice agent behaviors for the Taco Bell Voice AI program. This role sits at the intersection of LLM prompt engineering, real-time orchestration, and applied AI system design. You'll help craft agent logic, deploy optimized LLM and ASR-based components, and ensure the overall responsiveness and quality of the drive-thru AI experience. This role is ideal for a senior AI practitioner who thrives in high-velocity environments and is excited by the technical and creative challenges of voice-based AI systems.

    Key Responsibilities:

    + Agent Development & AI Orchestration:

    + Design, author, and maintain prompt chains, decision flows, and persona logic.

    + Integrate LLMs with speech, menu data, POS systems, and structured knowledge sources.

    + Lead the implementation of fallback logic, retry mechanisms, and safety filters.

    + Model Fine-Tuning & Optimization:

    + Fine-tune LLMs, ASR, and embedding models to optimize agent behavior and performance.

    + Leverage techniques like LoRA, quantization, distillation, and pruning.

    + Collaborate with MLEs to measure and reduce latency, response failure, and hallucination rates.

    + Team Leadership & Collaboration:

    + Mentor AI Engineers and Data Scientists on prompt strategy and model tuning.

    + Define evaluation workflows and scalable agent experimentation pipelines.

    + Work cross-functionally with PMs, MLEs, QA, and voice platform teams to align priorities.

    Required Qualifications:

    + 5+ years experience in AI Engineering, ML Systems, or LLM-driven development.

    + Deep experience with LLMs (e.g. OpenAI, Llama, Nemotron, Mistral) and prompt-based application design.

    + Strong coding skills in Python and experience with LangChain, vector stores, and API orchestration.

    + Experience fine-tuning or adapting ASR, embedding, or LLM models in production.

    Preferred Qualifications:

    + Familiarity with real-time audio systems and multi-turn conversational agents.

    + Experience deploying LLM agents in customer-facing use cases.

    + Understanding of speech interfaces, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and evaluation metrics.

    Location & Travel:

    + This role is based in Irvine, CA at the Taco Bell offices.

    + Hybrid work model: in-office 1-2 days per week required.

    + Occasional travel to test markets or partner locations may be required.

     

    Salary Range: $134,500-$158,300 annually + bonus eligibility. This is the expected salary range for this position. Ultimately, in determining pay, we'll consider the successful candidate's location, experience, and other job-related factors.