Job Title: Manager, AI Engineering - Taco Bell Voice AI

Company: YUM! Brands, Inc.

Location: Irvine, CA

Description: We are hiring a Manager, AI Engineering to lead the development of intelligent voice agent behaviors for the Taco Bell Voice AI program. This role sits at the intersection of LLM prompt engineering, real-time orchestration, and applied AI system design. You'll help craft agent logic, deploy optimized LLM and ASR-based components, and ensure the overall responsiveness and quality of the drive-thru AI experience. This role is ideal for a senior AI practitioner who thrives in high-velocity environments and is excited by the technical and creative challenges of voice-based AI systems.

Key Responsibilities:

• Agent Development & AI Orchestration:
  • 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.
• Model Fine-Tuning & Optimization:
  • 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.
• Team Leadership & Collaboration:
  • 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.

Required Qualifications:

• 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 Qualifications:

• 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.

Location & Travel:

• This role is based in Irvine, CA at the Taco Bell offices.
• Hybrid work model: in-office 1-2 days per week required.
• Occasional travel to test markets or partner locations may be required.

Salary Range: $134,500-$158,300 annually + bonus eligibility. This is the expected salary range for this position. Ultimately, in determining pay, we'll consider the successful candidate's location, experience, and other job-related factors.

Company Overview: The Yum! Brands story is simple. We have the four distinctive, relevant and easy global brands - KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell and The Habit Burger Grill -- born from the hopes and dreams, ambitions and grit of passionate entrepreneurs. And we want more of this to create our future! As the world's largest restaurant company we have a clear and compelling mission: to build the world's most loved, trusted and fastest-growing restaurant brands. The key and not-so-secret ingredient in our recipe for growth is our unrivaled talent and culture, which fuels our results. We're looking for talented, motivated, visionary and team-oriented leaders to join us as we elevate and personalize the customer experience across our 48,000 restaurants, operating in 145 countries and territories around the world! Employees may work for a single brand and potentially grow to support all company-owned brands depending on their role. Regardless of where they work, as a company opening an average of 8 restaurants a day worldwide, the growth opportunities are endless. Taco Bell has been named one of the 10 Most Innovative Companies in the World by Fast Company; Pizza Hut delivers more pizzas than any other pizza company in the world and KFC still uses its 75-year-old finger lickin' good recipe including secret herbs and spices to hand-bread its chicken every day. Yum! and its brands have offices in Chicago, IL, Louisville KY, Irvine, CA, Plano, TX and other markets around the world. We don't just say we are a great place to work - our commitments to the world and our employees show it. Yum! has been named to the Dow Jones Sustainability North America Index and ranked among the top 100 Best Corporate Citizens by Corporate Responsibility Magazine in addition to being named to the Bloomberg Gender-Equality Index. Our employees work in an environment where the value of 'believe in all people' is lived every day, enjoying benefits including but not limited to: 4 weeks' vacation PLUS holidays, sick leave and 2 paid days to volunteer at the cause of their choice and a dollar-for-dollar matching gift program; generous parental leave; competitive benefits including medical, dental, vision and life insurance as well as a 6% 401k match - all encompassed in Yum!'s world-famous recognition culture.