Taco Bell · 1 week ago
Manager, AI Engineering - Taco Bell Voice AI
Irvine, CA
Full-time
Hybrid
Senior Level
$134K/yr - $158K/yr
5+ years expTaco Bell is seeking a Manager, AI Engineering to lead the development of intelligent voice agent behaviors for the Taco Bell Voice AI program. The role involves crafting agent logic, deploying optimized components, and ensuring quality in the drive-thru AI experience.
Food and BeverageGift CardNutritionRestaurants
Responsibilities
Design, author, and maintain prompt chains, decision flows, and persona logic
Integrate LLMs with speech, menu data, POS systems, and structured knowledge sources
Lead the implementation of fallback logic, retry mechanisms, and safety filters
Fine-tune LLMs, ASR, and embedding models to optimize agent behavior and performance
Leverage techniques like LoRA, quantization, distillation, and pruning
Collaborate with MLEs to measure and reduce latency, response failure, and hallucination rates
Mentor AI Engineers and Data Scientists on prompt strategy and model tuning
Define evaluation workflows and scalable agent experimentation pipelines
Work cross-functionally with PMs, MLEs, QA, and voice platform teams to align priorities
Qualification
Required
5+ years experience in AI Engineering, ML Systems, or LLM-driven development
Deep experience with LLMs (e.g. OpenAI, Llama, Nemotron, Mistral) and prompt-based application design
Strong coding skills in Python and experience with LangChain, vector stores, and API orchestration
Experience fine-tuning or adapting ASR, embedding, or LLM models in production
Preferred
Familiarity with real-time audio systems and multi-turn conversational agents
Experience deploying LLM agents in customer-facing use cases
Understanding of speech interfaces, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and evaluation metrics
Benefits
4 weeks’ vacation PLUS holidays
Sick leave
2 paid days to volunteer at the cause of their choice
A dollar-for-dollar matching gift program
Generous parental leave
Competitive benefits including medical, dental, vision and life insurance
6% 401k match
World-famous recognition culture
Company
Taco Bell
Taco Bell is an American fast-food restaurant chain specializing in Tex-Mex meals. It is a sub-organization of Yum! Brands.
10001+ employees
H1B Sponsorship
Taco Bell has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (12)
2024 (10)
2023 (12)
2022 (8)
2021 (5)
2020 (3)
Funding
Current Stage
Late StageTotal Funding
$13.7MKey Investors
Norwest Mezzanine Partners
2022-06-01Series A
2006-11-29Debt Financing· $13.7M
Leadership Team
Sean Tresvant
Chief Executive Officer, Taco Bell | Chief Consumer Officer, Yum! Brands
Meghan Farren
President, North America
Recent News
2026-01-23
2026-01-21
Company data provided by crunchbase