The Opportunity
The $1.2T automotive industry is a pillar of American culture, representing nearly 5% of U.S. GDP and shaping how people live and move every day. At the center of this ecosystem are dealerships—trusted local businesses that help consumers navigate one of the most important purchases they make.
Today, the industry is at an inflection point. Consumers expect the same speed, personalization, and convenience they experience in modern digital-first industries. At the same time, tighter margins and rising costs are driving a need for operational efficiency beyond what traditional software can support. Together, these shifts create a powerful opportunity to reimagine how dealerships deliver seamless experiences and build lasting customer relationships.
Dealers who modernize how they communicate and operate will unlock efficiency, deepen loyalty, and win long-term relationships. It is time to upgrade automotive retail to the 21st century.
About Mia
Mia Labs is an investor-backed startup on a mission to modernize dealership operations and transform the automotive consumer experience. Our AI agent, Mia, turns every call or inquiry into an opportunity, improving customer satisfaction and dealership performance through automation that feels human. We are trusted by some of the nation's largest dealership groups and are rapidly scaling our team, product offerings, and customer base.
We're hiring an AI Engineer to work on our voice AI platform, the real-time pipeline of speech-to-text, LLM reasoning, and text-to-speech that powers every call. You'll work on latency, model quality, cost, and reliability across the full AI stack, and help shape which models and vendors we bet on. This is a deep, focused role on a small core product team, with direct mentorship from our AI lead.
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
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
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.
Compensation for this position will be competitive with current market rates and reflective of the candidate's experience, skills and qualifications.
At Mia, we’re committed to a workplace where everyone is valued, included, and empowered to do their best work. Our strength comes from diverse experiences, perspectives, and skills, and we’re proud to be an equal opportunity employer.
Passionate about the role but don’t tick every box? We’d still love to hear from you, you might be exactly who we need.
Mia is an EVerify employer.
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