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Text Chat Agent Jobs in Chicago, IL (NOW HIRING)

AppFolio

Sr. Machine Learning Engineer

Chicago, IL

$107K - $147K/yr

This role helps define AppFolio's production voice and chat agent pipelines, working at the ... Ship Voice & Text Agents: Architect and ship voice and text agent pipelines that handle real-time ...

ACARA

Materials Handler

Buffalo Grove, IL · On-site

$18.38/hr

AI agent role is to help speed up your hiring process by answering questions, confirming basic ... The call or chat may be recorded so that our recruiting team can review it - they make all final ...

New

Acara Solutions

Materials Handler

Buffalo Grove, IL

$18.38/hr

AI agent role is to help speed up your hiring process by answering questions, confirming basic ... The call or chat may be recorded so that our recruiting team can review it - they make all final ...

Aleron

Materials Handler

Buffalo Grove, IL · On-site

$18.38/hr

AI agent role is to help speed up your hiring process by answering questions, confirming basic ... The call or chat may be recorded so that our recruiting team can review it - they make all final ...

New

Ulta Beauty

Customer Care AI Program Lead

Bolingbrook, IL · On-site

  • Medical

  • Dental

  • Vision

  • Life

  • PTO

... chat, text, email, and social media. Our front-line Service Specialists are at the heart of this ... agent journeys that should be automated: support the design, launch, and optimization of new AI ...

All JobsText Chat Agent JobsText Chat Agent Jobs in Chicago, IL

Text Chat Agent information

See Chicago, IL salary details

$5

$17

$25

How much do text chat agent jobs pay per hour?

As of Aug 12, 2026, the average hourly pay for text chat agent in Chicago, IL is $17.66, according to ZipRecruiter salary data. Most workers in this role earn between $14.86 and $19.81 per hour, depending on experience, location, and employer.

What is a text chat agent?

A Text Chat Agent is a customer support representative who assists customers through live chat or messaging platforms. They handle inquiries, resolve issues, provide product information, and ensure a smooth customer experience without phone interactions. This role requires strong typing skills, problem-solving abilities, and a customer-centric approach. Many businesses, including e-commerce, tech support, and service industries, employ text chat agents to enhance customer service.

What does a text chat agent do?

As a Text Chat Agent, your workday typically involves managing multiple chat conversations with customers, answering inquiries, resolving complaints, and providing product or service information in real time. You will use chat platforms and customer databases to track interactions, escalate complex issues to specialized teams, and document resolutions accurately. Most Text Chat Agents work as part of a remote or in-office customer service team, collaborating with supervisors and colleagues to meet service goals. This role requires consistent attention to detail, quick response times, and clear written communication throughout your shift.

What are the key skills and qualifications needed to thrive as a text chat agent?

To thrive as a Text Chat Agent, you need excellent written communication skills, fast and accurate typing abilities, and a high school diploma or equivalent. Familiarity with customer service platforms, CRM systems, and chat software like Zendesk or LiveChat is often required. Strong multitasking, empathy, and problem-solving abilities set top performers apart in this role. These skills ensure customers receive timely, clear assistance and that issues are resolved efficiently, leading to higher satisfaction and loyalty.

What are the most commonly searched types of Text Chat Agent jobs in Chicago, IL? The most popular types of Text Chat Agent jobs in Chicago, IL are:
What are popular job titles related to Text Chat Agent jobs in Chicago, IL? For Text Chat Agent jobs in Chicago, IL, the most frequently searched job titles are:
What job categories do people searching Text Chat Agent jobs in Chicago, IL look for? The top searched job categories for Text Chat Agent jobs in Chicago, IL are:
Text Chat Agent jobs near you
Infographic showing various Text Chat Agent job openings in Chicago, IL as of August 2026, with employment types broken down into 100% Full Time. Highlights an 100% In-person job distribution, with an average salary of $36,739 per year, or $17.7 per hour.

Sr. Machine Learning Engineer

AppFolio

Chicago, IL

$107K - $147K/yr

Full-time

Re-posted 6 days ago

AppFolio rating

7.2

Company rating: 7.2 out of 10

Based on 8 frontline employees who took The Breakroom Quiz

183rd of 243 rated software companies

Job 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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