AI Experience Engineer (Conversational AI) at Upgrade, Inc.

<p><span style="color: #000000;"><strong>About the Role:</strong><br><br>An AI Experience Engineer owns the full lifecycle of the journeys our customers have with Upgrade's AI agent on chat, voice and email: creation, optimization, edge case handling and containment growth. They build journeys in Sierra's no-code tooling, partner with Upgrade's product groups to bring their servicing flows to the agent, and are accountable for whether the agent resolves the customer's issue safely, accurately and without a human.</span></p> <p><span style="color: #000000;">We are hiring an AI Experience Engineer to own Upgrade's customer-facing AI agent. You will sit between engineering, product and customer operations. You will turn servicing workflows, such as making a payment, checking loan details, updating an address or enabling autopay, into production journeys and keep improving them after launch. </span><span style="color: #000000;">You will build and own the journeys end to end, from first draft to steady state. The work is part builder, part analyst: design the flow, handle the edge cases, read the transcripts, and keep raising containment. Containment, CSAT, transfer quality and hallucination rate are your metrics.</span></p> <p><span style="color: #000000;">Within your first year, you will own a portfolio of journeys across products (Personal Loans, Card, BNPL, HELOC, Deposits) and help set the standards for how Upgrade builds, tests and ships AI experiences.</span></p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><span style="color: #000000;"><strong>Our Core Technologies</strong></span></p> <p><span style="color: #000000;">Sierra Agent Studio (no-code journeys), Sierra simulations and conversation analytics, GraphQL and REST APIs (as journey tools), Genesys (contact center handoff), SumoLogic, Grafana, SQL, Javascript/Typescript, Claude and other LLM tools.</span></p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><span style="color: #000000;"><strong>What You'll Do</strong></span></p> <p><span style="color: #000000;">• <strong>Journey creation:</strong> Design and build Sierra journeys in Agent Studio for chat, voice and email, from discovery with operations through production rollout</span></p> <p><span style="color: #000000;">• <strong>Optimization:</strong> Review transcripts, recordings and analytics every week, find where conversations fail or transfer, and ship fixes to journey logic, instructions and knowledge</span></p> <p><span style="color: #000000;">• <strong>Edge case handling: </strong>Map the unhappy paths (failed payments, mismatched identity, delinquent accounts, unsupported requests) and make sure each ends in a correct answer or a clean handoff</span></p> <p><span style="color: #000000;">• <strong>Containment:</strong> Own containment and CSAT targets per journey, run staged rollouts (1% → 100%), and prioritize the work that moves those numbers most</span></p> <p><span style="color: #000000;">• <strong>Product partnership:</strong> Work with product groups (Personal Loans, Card, BNPL, Deposits) to scope new journeys, keep journeys current as products change, and define the APIs the agent needs</span></p> <p><span style="color: #000000;">• <strong>Safety and compliance:</strong> Apply tiered authentication and step-up verification, verbatim compliance language and guardrails against hallucination and off-policy answers</span></p> <p><span style="color: #000000;">• <strong>Handoffs:</strong> Design transfers to human agents in Genesys with accurate summaries and auth context</span></p> <p><span style="color: #000000;">• <strong>Testing:</strong> Build simulation and regression suites so every journey change ships with evidence it did not break existing behavior</span></p> <p><span style="color: #000000;">• <strong>Monitoring: </strong>Watch latency, errors and drop-offs in SumoLogic and Grafana, and own the alerts</span></p> <p><span style="color: #000000;">• <strong>Voice tuning:</strong> Latency, filler phrases, interruptions, personality and tone</span></p> <p><span style="color: #000000;">• <strong>Sierra relationship: </strong>Be the technical owner on our side, escalate platform issues and shape roadmap asks</span></p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><span style="color: #000000;"><strong>What We Look For:</strong></span></p> <p><span style="color: #000000;">• 3–5 years of Frontend Software Engineering experience, or equivalent experience in Solutions Engineering, Conversational AI or Technical Product roles</span></p> <p><span style="color: #000000;">• Working knowledge of how LLM agents behave: instructions, tool calls, knowledge retrieval, and where each one fails</span></p> <p><span style="color: #000000;">• Experience building evaluations for non-deterministic systems: test sets, simulations, LLM-as-judge, regression gates</span></p> <p><span style="color: #000000;">• Enough technical depth to read API specs, work with backend engineers on REST and GraphQL integrations, and reason about authorization and permission scopes</span></p> <p><span style="color: #000000;">• Working knowledge of JavaScript/TypeScript, with the ability to build and maintain coded journeys and integrate APIs within conversational AI platforms.</span></p> <p><span style="color: #000000;">• Product and customer mindset: you understand ops procedures, you read transcripts, care about tone, and measure success by whether the customer's problem got solved</span></p> <p><span style="color: #000000;">• Ownership in production: rollouts, monitoring, log analysis and incident response</span></p> <p><span style="color: #000000;">• Clear writing and the ability to work with non-engineers in operations, compliance and legal</span></p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><span style="color: #000000;"><strong>Nice To Have:</strong></span></p> <p><span style="color: #000000;">• Hands-on experience with Sierra Agent Studio, or a comparable no-code agent platform (Decagon, Ada, Kore.ai, Google CCAI, Amazon Lex/Connect)</span></p> <p><span style="color: #000000;">• Voice AI experience: speech-to-text, text-to-speech, latency tuning, barge-in handling</span></p> <p><span style="color: #000000;">• Contact center systems such as Genesys, and agent handoff design</span></p> <p><span style="color: #000000;">• Background in fintech or another regulated industry (UDAAP, FDCPA, TCPA, PCI, SOC 2)</span></p> <p><span style="color: #000000;">• Conversation design or UX writing experience</span></p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><span style="color: #000000;"><strong>What We Offer You:&nbsp;</strong></span></p> <p><span style="color: #000000;">• Competitive salary ($140K-$180K CAN) and stock option plan</span></p> <p><span style="color: #000000;">• Paid coverage of medical, dental and vision insurance&nbsp;</span></p> <p><span style="color: #000000;">• Flexible PTO</span></p> <p><span style="color: #000000;">• Opportunities for professional growth and development<br>• Paid parental leave</span></p> <p><span style="color: #000000;">• Health &amp; wellness initiatives</span></p>