Sr. Machine Learning Engineer

AppFolio is building an AI-native platform that transforms how the real estate industry operates. The Senior Machine Learning Engineer will design and ship production voice and conversational AI agents within Realm-X, collaborating across Product, Voice, and ML Platform teams to deliver reliable, low-latency, multi-channel experiences. The role also includes leading a small engineering pod, defining agent quality standards, and optimizing models and infrastructure for voice latency and cost.

Responsibilities:

• Ship Voice & Text Agents: Architect and ship voice and text agent pipelines that handle real-time, multi-turn customer interactions
• Reasoning vs. Latency: Make principled trade-offs between reasoning depth and latency across frontier LLMs, smaller models, and routing strategies
• Lead a Pod: Lead a small pod of ML and platform engineers; raise the bar on agent evaluation, observability, and incident response
• Define Quality: Partner with Product and Voice channel teams to define KPIs, eval harnesses, and acceptance criteria for agent quality
• Optimize for Voice: Drive selective Small Language Model (SLM) fine-tuning and inference optimization for voice latency and cost