Associate Manager, AI Engineering - Taco Bell Voice AI

We are hiring an Associate Manager, AI Engineering to help design and improve voice-based AI agents for Taco Bell drive-thru operations. These roles are perfect for early-career AI engineers or data scientists looking to expand their skills in LLM-based interaction design, speech system optimization, and production-quality prompt development.

Key Responsibilities:

Prompt Engineering & Agent Design:

• Author and refine prompt instructions, chaining logic, and fallback strategies.
• Design and test multi-turn conversation flows aligned to Taco Bell brand voice.
• Build and maintain system personas and error handling routines.

Model Tuning & Evaluation:

• Fine-tune LLMs, ASR models, and embedding systems under supervision.
• Assist in running experiments using LoRA, distillation, or pruning methods.
• Contribute to agent evaluation metrics, regression tracking, and A/B tests.

Cross-Functional Collaboration:

• Work closely with MLEs on model integration and performance tuning.
• Partner with QA and PMs to improve agent usability, reliability, and task success rates.
• Help manage RAG components, context retrieval chains, and structured data inputs.

Required Qualifications:

• 1–3 years experience in AI Engineering, Data Science, or ML-related roles.
• Proficiency in Python and AI frameworks (e.g., LangChain, HuggingFace, OpenAI APIs).
• Understanding of prompt engineering, agent flows, and model evaluation principles.
• Interest in LLM tuning, ASR modeling, or speech interaction design.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with RAG, vector search, embeddings, or retrieval-based models.
• Exposure to ASR systems or speech pipelines.
• Familiarity with LoRA, distillation, or low-latency AI architectures.

Location & Travel:

• This role is remote.
• Occasional travel to test markets or pilot sites may be required.

Salary Range: $134,500-$148,300 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.

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 love, 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!

We put pizza, chicken and tacos in the hands of customers through customized ordering, unique delivery approaches, app experiences, and click and collect services and consumer data analytics creating unique customer dining experiences – and we are only getting started.

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 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’s still use 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.