---
title: 'Telephony Infrastructure Engineer at Salient'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/telephony-infrastructure-engineer-salient-san-francisco-f5fgtgdh7b05'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-14'
---

# Telephony Infrastructure Engineer at Salient

- **Company:** Salient
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $200k–$300k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-09-26
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-14
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/salient/6af0cafd-bd6b-425e-9154-020ec8711776

## Job description

## About Us

Salient builds AI agents for regulated financial services. Our agents automate loan servicing, compliance, collections, recovery, insurance claims, and disputes for banks, captives, and specialty lenders. We are:

- Backed by a16z and Y Combinator, with $75M raised in Series A funding
- Cash flow positive and profitable, with mid eight figure ARR achieved in under two years
- Already serving more than 20% of the auto lending industry
- Processing millions of real customer calls and transactions every day
- Fully deployed in production with major financial institutions
- Actively expanding into new financial services segments
- Building together in person in San Francisco

We are deeply integrated with our customers, own the full technology stack, and move quickly to bring modern AI into regulated industries where precision, reliability, and performance matter.

## About the Role

We're hiring a Telephony Infrastructure Engineer to own the voice platform behind Salient's AI agents: the SIP edge, Asterisk, the voice audio and dialing layers, and the call servers that connect borrowers to our agents. You will work directly with our AI agent engineers, telephony specialist, customer success, and carriers.

This is a hands-on ownership role. You will finish work in flight, make the platform reliable and safe to change, and prove it can handle the next order of magnitude of call volume. You will also design and implement customer telephony integrations and make them increasingly self-serve.

## What You'll Own

- Finishing the Asterisk migration: cutting over remaining customers, trunks, and call flows with no regression, then retiring the legacy path.
- Reliability of the voice audio and dialing layers: SLOs, monitoring, incident response, and eliminating recurring failure modes.
- Zero-downtime call-server deployments: draining, graceful shutdown, safe rollout, and rollback without dropping live calls.
- Building tools to manage Kamailio and Asterisk reconfiguration without server restarts inside Kubernetes
- Backpressure, load shedding, and self-recovery when carriers, media, or AI dependencies degrade.
- Load testing and capacity planning that validates thousands of concurrent calls and CPS at the SIP edge.
- Voice observability: call-quality and platform-health metrics, alerting, runbooks, and postmortems.
- Security of the voice edge against scanning, toll fraud, and abuse.
- Customer telephony integrations: custom SIP trunks (e.g., Genesys, Bandwidth), call transfers, SIP header passing, and API prototypes with new contact-center platforms.
- Self-serve setup: productized trunk configurations, validation tooling, and docs that shorten time to go live.

## What We're Looking For

- You've run production voice infrastructure at meaningful scale and have been on call for it.
- You know SIP, SDP, and RTP deeply and debug from traces and pcaps.
- You can debug EC2/K8s networking issues that result in deadair—and develop monitoring and testing plans to minimize deadair.
- You understand real-time media, WebRTC, and latency budgets.
- You design for backpressure, graceful degradation, and safe deploys of stateful services.
- You've built load tests that found real bottlenecks before customers did.
- You write clear design docs, runbooks, and postmortems.
- You've integrated SIP trunks with customer contact centers and carriers, including transfers and header passing.

## Nice to Have

- Experience with Kamailio, Asterisk, OpenSIPS, FreeSWITCH, or rtpengine.
- Experience developing regional failover for SIP
- Experience with latency-aware multi-homing
- Experience with contact-center, dialer, CpaaS, or carrier infrastructure.
- Experience with AI voice agents, speech pipelines, or regulated industries such as lending.
- Experience with contact-center platforms such as Genesys, Five9, NICE, or Amazon Connect.

## Why This Role

Every Salient product depends on a phone call working. You will own the platform that carries those calls and make it reliable, easy to change, and ready for the volume our customers are about to send it. At Salient, we’re building at the edge of AI - fast, focused, and with real ownership. Sprints and major launches move quickly, and we look for people who are energized by that pace. Our team typically works around 60 hours per week, beginning at 8:00 AM, with four days spent collaborating in person at our San Francisco office. We also offer a benefits package designed to support our full-time employees: medical, dental, and vision coverage, a generous 401(k), and catered lunches. By applying, you acknowledge that your personal information will be processed in accordance with our [Privacy Policy](https://www.trysalient.com/legal/privacy-policy).

## About Salient

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Salient builds AI-native loan servicing agents that automate collections, disputes, and loss mitigation for US consumer lenders.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Funded: $75M total raised)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2023
- **Founders**: Mukund Tibrewala (CEO) and Arijit Malik (CTO)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Consumer lending / Fintech / AI workflow automation
- **Target customers**: B2B – banks, credit unions, auto lenders, and fintechs operating in US consumer lending.
- **Mission**: To lower the cost of credit for every American by building AI that is reliable, auditable, and compliant.

## Products & Services
- **Taylor 2.0**: AI agent for inbound and outbound collections calls with native FDCPA, TCPA, and CFPB compliance. Handles end-to-end conversations, negotiations, and payment promises.
- **Marshall 1.4**: Agent for GAP claim automation and appraisal-clause deadline management.
- **Flyn 1.2**: Agent for dispute and chargeback resolution.
All products are designed with borrower-level memory, cross-channel context, and exam-ready audit trails.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: ~$500M (as of late 2025, per Y Combinator; conflicting reports may exist)
- **Key Metrics**:
  - Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR): $25M (per Y Combinator, 2025)
  - LinkedIn reports $4.7M annual revenue (likely earlier or GAAP vs ARR difference)
  - Daily active users: agents touch more than 1.5 million Americans every day
- **Total Funding**: $75M across seed and Series A
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Andreessen Horowitz (led $60M Series A), Matrix Partners, Y Combinator; selected by JPMorgan Chase for Hall of Innovation
- **Growth Signals**: Team grew 185% YoY to ~46 employees; 8 open roles as of mid-2025; expanded law repository and LMS-level compliance features in 2026 releases.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Compliance-first design**: Built from the ground up inside lender operations to meet CFPB, state-level, and supervisory expectations.
- **Borrower-level memory**: Every interaction updates a persistent profile across promises, hardships, disputes, and escalation history.
- **Embedded origin**: Co-developed with some of the largest US consumer lenders – not a generic AI applied post-hoc.
- **Audit-ready**: Full logging, exam-ready reporting, and rule-level control out of the box.

## Strategic Focus
- Deepening product coverage for auto lending and expanding into more consumer lending verticals (credit cards, personal loans).
- Strengthening compliance capabilities with expanded law repositories and LMS-level control.
- Scaling deployments across existing launch partners and acquiring new bank/credit union clients.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Early-stage startup environment with deep domain focus; founded by former Tesla/Goldman Sachs (Mukund) and Airtable/Dropbox (Arijit). Emphasis on building inside the problem.
- **Location**: San Francisco headquarters; roles listed as SF with a hybrid/office presence expected.
- **Team**: ~46 people with heavy engineering/technical composition (46% of workforce). High autonomy and ownership.
- **Perks/Notable**: Backed by top-tier VCs; opportunity to shape AI infrastructure for a highly regulated industry; roles span engineering, product, and operations.

## Sources
1. [trysalient.com](https://www.trysalient.com/)
2. [trysalient.com/company](https://www.trysalient.com/company)
3. [ycombinator.com/companies/salient](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/salient)
4. [linkedin.com/company/salientai](https://www.linkedin.com/company/salientai)

## Other roles at Salient

- [Office Coordinator](https://feeny.ai/job/office-coordinator-salient-san-francisco-046ha4g52492) — San Francisco, CA
- [Telephony Specialist](https://feeny.ai/job/telephony-specialist-salient-san-francisco-y565mgs84tnk) — San Francisco, CA
- [Senior Product Manager, Marshall](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-product-manager-marshall-salient-san-francisco-jejys40j3t3z) — San Francisco, CA
- [Lead Security Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/lead-security-engineer-salient-san-francisco-fsvsb0b6d3mw) — San Francisco, CA
- [Cloud Infrastructure Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/cloud-infrastructure-engineer-salient-san-francisco-rasff0h4a1vv) — San Francisco, CA
- [Lead Product Manager, AI Agents](https://feeny.ai/job/lead-product-manager-ai-agents-salient-san-francisco-f4zqnh501577) — San Francisco, CA
- [Founder's Office](https://feeny.ai/job/founder-s-office-salient-san-francisco-v1nwwbzwvs4s) — San Francisco, CA
- [Founding Product Designer](https://feeny.ai/job/founding-product-designer-salient-san-francisco-y809xaazpm2f) — San Francisco, CA
- [Full Stack Engineer, Front-End](https://feeny.ai/job/full-stack-engineer-front-end-salient-san-francisco-5ggw0z7ychdt) — San Francisco, CA
- [AI Deployment Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/ai-deployment-lead-salient-san-francisco-4myp38c0xp1b) — San Francisco, CA