Applied AI Engineer

The posting, as Slangai wrote it

About Slang AI
Slang AI is redefining customer engagement through conversational AI. Our mission is to transform the restaurant industry with the ultimate voice AI solution for consistently outstanding guest experiences.
We believe how we build matters as much as what we build. Our culture is rooted in our values, so every “Slangsta” feels valued, supported, and connected to the impact of our work on the future of restaurants.
How We Use AI in Hiring
Slang AI uses AI tools to help review applications, and a person makes every hiring decision. No one is rejected by AI alone: a member of our team reviews your actual application before any decision. To learn more about how we use AI, to ask for a person to review your application without an AI step, or to request an accommodation, let your recruiter know.
Using AI During Your Application
You’re welcome to use AI tools to prepare, for example to polish your résumé or practice interview questions. During live interviews and assessments, please don’t use AI tools to generate your answers unless we say it’s allowed. To make sure we’re speaking with you, we’ll ask you to have your camera on for at least one live interview. If you can’t use a camera, let us know and we’ll find another way.
Equal Opportunity at Slang
Slang AI is an equal opportunity employer. We hire based on qualifications, merit, and business need. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, creed, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, ancestry, citizenship or immigration status, age, disability, pregnancy, marital or partnership status, caregiver status, genetic information, military or veteran status, height, weight, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local law. We consider qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records in a manner consistent with the NYC Fair Chance Act and applicable law. If you need a reasonable accommodation at any point in the application or interview process, let your recruiter know.

What Your Experience Will Be
You'll join Slang's Engineering team as our Applied AI Engineer, the person who turns foundation models into products that restaurants trust with their phones. This is not a research or model-training role. You'll work with hosted frontier models and open-weight alternatives, and our own stack to solve real product problems: choosing the right model for each job, designing prompt architectures that hold up across model versions, wiring up agents and tool calls, and proving with evaluation that every change makes the product better before it reaches a guest. When a caller asks for a table for four on Friday at 7, you're the reason the AI gets the date right, sounds like a great host, and knows when to hand off to a human.
You'll lead the work to put model calls behind clean interfaces, redesign prompts so they travel across providers, and build the evaluation and A/B testing machinery that lets us swap models with c
[…]
and contributions

• Comprehensive benefits including health, dental, and vision insurance
• Professional development opportunities to enhance your skills and career trajectory
• Contribute to a company mission that transforms the restaurant and hospitality industry
• Participation in the engineering on-call rotation (a week-long shift roughly every two months)

You'll come away seeing AI the way the best operators see hospitality: the magic is in the details nobody notices when they're done right.
Compensation & Location
The base salary range for this role in New York City is $217,000 to $242,000. Total compensation also includes equity.
Compensation for this role is location-based and benchmarked against local market data aligned to the employee’s primary work location. Total compensation includes a mix of cash and equity and may vary by location, role level, and experience. Our range is therefore wide and not meant as a negotiation range.
Our Vision
Calling a business shouldn’t feel like a robot-hostage situation: hold music, no human in sight, and a soulless voice repeating “I’m sorry, I didn’t quite get that.” (Shudder.) That’s why we started Slang AI. We use the latest AI and audio wizardry to make transacting by voice so enjoyable it’s more human than human. By 2030, we will save businesses and consumers 1 billion minutes and make voice the preferred way to communicate (it’s faster and easier than text).
Our team has built products at Spotify, BuzzFeed, the New York Times, and OpenTable that reached hundreds of millions of users. Now we’re building a culture that puts product and human-centered design first and never stops learning. Sound like you? Get on board.
Our Values

• AI Native. We don’t just sell AI. We are AI.
• Overachiever Fever. We’re overachievers (we don’t know any other way).
• Humility Ability. We approach each other with curiosity and openness (know-it-alls not welcome!).
• Be a Good Host. We build for hospitality. We should embody it.