Remote Optical Engineer Jobs in Santa Barbara, CA

Description
Hi, We're AppFolio
We're innovators, changemakers, and collaborators. We're more than just a software company - we're building the AI-native platform where the real estate industry comes to do business. We're transforming Property Management; how property managers operate, how residents live, and how intelligence flows across an entire industry.
Realm-X is AppFolio's AI-native platform powering this transformation. It enables a new generation of intelligent capabilities across our products, including Realm-X Assistant (copilot), Flows (AI Agentic workflows) and Performers (autonomous AI Agents). Realm-X serves as both a foundation for internal teams to build and scale AI-powered products, and a core layer delivering intelligent, high-impact experiences directly to our customers.
At its core, Realm-X is built on a structured domain ontology and a set of shared business primitives-such as transactions, actions, reports, metrics, and skills-that enable AI systems to deeply understand and operate across the full context of property management workflows. This foundation allows us to build context-aware, action-oriented AI systems that go beyond simple assistance to power real automation and decision-making.
Who We Are Looking For
We're hiring a Senior Machine Learning Engineer to design and ship the next generation of voice and conversational AI agents within Realm-X. This role helps define AppFolio's production voice and chat agent pipelines, working at the intersection of LLM agent frameworks, real-time voice technology, and streaming infrastructure.
You will work with Product, Voice channel, and ML Platform teams to translate cutting-edge agent and voice research into reliable, low-latency, multi-channel experiences that scale across our entire customer base.
Your Impact

• 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.

Qualifications

• You have shipped production AI agents serving real users in voice and/or text channels.
• You think in pipelines and systems, not just models.
• You move fast, deliver impact, and maintain sound engineering judgment.
• You are humble, collaborative, and low-ego, and you elevate those around you.
• You value work-life balance as a foundation for sustained high performance.

Must Have

• Agent frameworks: Deep, shipped experience with LangChain, LangGraph, LangSmith, and LangChain Deep Agents (or equivalent agent frameworks).
• Voice stack: Hands-on with Voice-to-Voice models and traditional TTS / STT pipelines; understands the trade-offs between end-to-end voice models and modular STT → LLM → TTS architectures.
• LLM fluency: Strong grasp of LLM reasoning behavior, tool use, structured output, and reasoning-vs-latency trade-offs across providers.
• Telephony & cloud: Production experience with Twilio (or comparable telephony) and AWS.
• Engineering: Expert Python, async programming, and WebSockets for real-time, bidirectional streaming.
• ML fundamentals: Solid foundation in deep learning, model evaluation, and inference optimization; able to deploy with Docker on AWS.
• Leadership: Demonstrated ability to lead a small team, mentor engineers, and partner credibly with Product and Design.

Nice to Have

• Experience fine-tuning Small Language Models for domain-specific voice applications.
• Familiarity with RAG over structured business data and tool-using agents over API surfaces.
• Prior experience in regulated or customer-facing industries with strict reliability requirements.
• Publicly verifiable work on GitHub, in open-source agent frameworks, or in community competitions.

Location
Find out more about our locations by visiting our site.
All late-stage candidates complete an in-person meeting with an AppFolian as part of our hiring process.
Compensation & Benefits
The compensation that we reasonably expect to pay for this role is: 167,200 - 209,000 base pay. The actual compensation for this role will be determined by a variety of factors, including but not limited to the candidate's skills, education, experience, and internal equity.
Please note that compensation is just one aspect of a comprehensive Total Rewards package. The compensation range listed here does not include additional benefits or any discretionary bonuses you may be eligible for based on your role and/or employment type.
Regular full-time employees are eligible for benefits - see here.
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About AppFolio
AppFolio is the technology leader powering the future of the real estate industry. Our innovative platform and trusted partnership enable our customers to connect communities, increase operational efficiency, and grow their business. For more information about AppFolio, visit appfolio.com.
Why AppFolio
Grow We enable a culture of high performance, where delivering results is recognized by opportunities for growth and compelling total rewards. Our challenging and meaningful work drive the growth of our business, and ourselves.
Learn We partner with you to realize your potential by investing in you from the start. We're cultivating a team of big thinkers through coaching and mentorship with our best-in-class leaders, and giving you the time and tools to develop your skills.
Impact We are creating a world where living in, investing in, managing, and supporting communities feels magical and effortless, freeing people to thrive. We do this by innovating with purpose while cultivating a culture of impact. We learn as much from each other as we do our customers and our communities.
Connect We excel at hybrid work by fostering an environment that feels flexible, personal and connected, no matter where we are. We create space to fuel innovation and collaboration, and we come together to celebrate, connect, and succeed.
Paddle as One.
Learn more at appfolio.com/company/careers
Statement of Equal Opportunity
At AppFolio, we value diversity in backgrounds and perspectives and depend on it to drive our innovative culture. That's why we're a proud Equal Opportunity Employer, and we believe that our products, our teams, and our business are stronger because of it. This means that no matter what race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identification, national origin, age, marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, or veteran status, you're always welcome at AppFolio.