AI Conversation Engineer
Group: Engineering
Roll-out by scenario
| Scenario | Engagement | Window | Rate | Year-one cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A: full-time studio | Full-time remote employee | M1–M11 | $110,000–$160,000 base/yr | $126,042–$198,000 |
| B: lean core + contracts | Full-time remote employee | M1–M11 | $110,000–$160,000 base/yr | $126,042–$198,000 |
Employee cost = base × months ÷ 12 × (1 + 25–35% employer load). Contract cost = hours × hourly rate.
Responsibilities
- Conversation service: retrieval over corpora A/B/C, policy layer (cutoff, refusals, trauma protocol), LLM integration
- Streaming speech: ASR, TTS with the locked actor voice, audio-driven face hookup
- Evaluation harness: golden question set, regression on every corpus or model change, red-team runs
- Logging and staff dashboard; offline fallback; school allowlist endpoint
Skills
- RAG (hybrid search, chunking, citation IDs)
- LLM APIs and a small on-prem model
- Streaming ASR/TTS and latency budgets
- Python back end; Unreal integration via HTTP/WebSocket
- Privacy-safe analytics
Requirements
- 3–6 years software engineering, 1–2 years shipping LLM products
- Portfolio: a retrieval system with evaluation
- Comfort working with historians' rules as hard constraints
Training (local tutorials)
- Tutorial — MetaHumans in Unreal
- Tutorial — Authoring a Q&A Experience with Ambient Idle
- Tutorial — Conversation Client Plugin
- Tutorial — How the Mind Works
- Tutorial — Building a Figure's Corpus
- Tutorial — Retrieval with Citations
- Tutorial — Writing a Persona for a Historical Figure
- Tutorial — Policy Layer with Guardrails
- Tutorial — Evaluating Answers
- Tutorial — Authored Answers for Top Questions
- Tutorial — Speech In
- Tutorial — Speech Out
- Tutorial — Choosing Cloud or Local Models
- Tutorial — Local Inference for Offline Venues
- Tutorial — Persona Sandbox with SillyTavern
- Tutorial — Staff Dashboard
- Tutorial — Privacy and Logging
Remote working
Fully remote. US hours overlap of 4+ hours with both founders.
Rate evidence
- Glassdoor remote LLM engineer: median $116k, range $94k–$189k (2026)
- Glassdoor, remote LLM engineer salary 2026: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/remote-llm-engineer-salary-SRCH_IL.0,6_IS12228_KO7,19.htm