Conversational AI Engineer Job Description Template

The conversational AI engineer builds systems that interact with people through natural dialogue, covering intent handling, context management, integration with back end systems and the escalation paths for when the system cannot help. The hard parts are rarely the language understanding: they are handling ambiguity, maintaining context and knowing when to hand over to a person.

Typical Duties and Responsibilities

• Design and build conversational flows and dialogue management
• Implement intent handling and context tracking across turns
• Integrate with back end systems to complete user requests
• Design escalation and handover to human agents
• Build evaluation covering task completion rather than only response quality
• Analyze conversation logs to find failure patterns
• Implement guardrails and appropriate response boundaries
• Optimize for latency, since conversation is sensitive to delay
• Work with support teams on tone, policy and escalation rules
• Monitor production conversations and iterate on weaknesses

Education

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, computational linguistics or a related field

Required Skills and Experience

• 3+ years building conversational or dialogue systems
• Strong Python and experience with language models
• Understanding of dialogue state and context management
• Experience integrating conversational systems with back end services
• Ability to design evaluation around task completion
• Analytical skill with conversation logs
• Understanding of when a system should stop trying and escalate
• Attention to latency and its effect on conversation

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with voice interfaces as well as text
• Background in customer support systems