Software Engineer (AI/ML)

Summary

Mia Labs is an investor-backed startup on a mission to modernize dealership operations and transform the automotive consumer experience. They are seeking a Software Engineer (AI/ML) to work on their voice AI platform, focusing on building and improving the real-time pipeline of speech-to-text, LLM reasoning, and text-to-speech.

Responsibilities

• Build and improve the real-time voice AI pipeline: speech-to-text, conversational LLM orchestration, and text-to-speech, with hard latency targets (we hold P90 end-to-end latency under 2 seconds and are pushing lower)
• Improve model performance in production, run evals for core functionality
• Improve instrumentation (OTel/Braintrust), build dashboards and alerting
• Optimize cost: squeezing more throughput out of open source LLMs
• Work with vendors like Anthropic, Microsoft/Azure OpenAI, Deepgram, and NVIDIA — testing new voice and language models, evaluating alternatives, and handling failover when a provider has issues
• Ship AI R&D features into production: things like backchanneling, emotional expressiveness, background audio, voice cloning, and multilingual features
• Implement AI guardrails so models behave correctly on live customer calls

Skills

• 1+ years of experience in software development (including relevant internships)
• Strong engineering fundamentals: you write production code, instrument it, and own what you ship
• Comfort with observability tooling (OpenTelemetry or similar) and making decisions from metrics
• Scrappy, startup-ready mindset: small team, broad ownership, fast iteration
• Clear communicator — you'll explain AI behavior and tradeoffs to product, support, and customer-facing teams
• Experience with real-time audio or voice AI (STT/TTS pipelines, streaming, WebRTC/networking, telephony)
• Hands-on experience building with LLMs in production: prompt design, model evaluation, latency/cost optimization
• Background in speech/audio ML (a founder or early builder of a voice product is a great signal — that's how our current Head of AI got here)
• Azure cloud experience

Qualifications

Must Haves

• 1+ years of experience in software development (including relevant internships)
• Strong engineering fundamentals: you write production code, instrument it, and own what you ship
• Comfort with observability tooling (OpenTelemetry or similar) and making decisions from metrics
• Scrappy, startup-ready mindset: small team, broad ownership, fast iteration
• Clear communicator — you'll explain AI behavior and tradeoffs to product, support, and customer-facing teams

Nice to Haves

• Experience with real-time audio or voice AI (STT/TTS pipelines, streaming, WebRTC/networking, telephony)
• Hands-on experience building with LLMs in production: prompt design, model evaluation, latency/cost optimization
• Background in speech/audio ML (a founder or early builder of a voice product is a great signal — that's how our current Head of AI got here)
• Azure cloud experience

Benefits

• Equity participation through stock options.
• Fully paid health, vision & dental insurance for employees.
• Flexible PTO and hybrid schedule (3 days / week in downtown Austin).
• Free lunches, parking stipend provided, team events, and a casual, but get things done culture.