[Remote] AI Engineer (Contract)

Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Presto Phoenix, Inc. is a leading Voice AI company for restaurant drive-thrus, focusing on building impactful real-world applications of AI. They are seeking an AI Engineer Contractor to help build, deploy, and improve their Voice AI platform, working on large language models and real-time systems to enhance customer interactions across restaurant locations.

Responsibilities

• Build and improve production AI systems
• Develop and deploy AI/ML models and LLM-powered systems used in real-time voice interactions
• Work across the full lifecycle from prototyping to production deployment and optimization
• Improve system performance across latency, accuracy, and scalability
• Work with LLMs and modern AI tooling
• Build and experiment with LLM-based systems using APIs or custom models
• Design and iterate on prompts, workflows, and system behaviors
• Leverage modern development tools (e.g., Claude Code, Codex) to accelerate development
• Own data quality and model inputs
• Clean, structure, and filter messy real-world data to improve model performance
• Develop pipelines and processes that ensure high-quality training and evaluation data
• Contribute to fast iteration cycles
• Quickly ramp on existing codebases and contribute with minimal oversight
• Test, evaluate, and iterate on new approaches to improve system behavior
• Stay current with the latest advancements in AI, LLMs, and applied machine learning
• Collaborate across teams
• Work closely with engineering, product, and AI teams to deliver new capabilities
• Translate real-world problems into practical AI solutions
• Communicate technical tradeoffs and system behavior clearly

Skills

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, AI, Machine Learning, or related field (or equivalent experience)
• 2–4+ years of experience in AI/ML engineering or software engineering with applied AI
• Hands-on experience building or deploying LLM-based systems (APIs or custom models)
• Strong programming skills in Python
• Experience with ML frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, or similar
• Experience working with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and deploying systems at scale
• Strong understanding of software engineering fundamentals (data structures, systems design, debugging)
• Ability to work in fast-paced, ambiguous startup environments
• Strong attention to detail and ability to manage multiple priorities
• Experience with real-time or low-latency systems
• Experience with speech, voice AI, or conversational systems
• Experience working with messy, real-world datasets at scale
• Experience building end-to-end ML pipelines

Company Overview

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