Manager, AI Engineering - Taco Bell Voice AI

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 Lang Chain, 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.