Telephony Specialist

About Us

Salient builds AI agents for regulated financial services. Our agents automate loan servicing, compliance, collections, recovery, insurance claims, and disputes for banks, captives, and specialty lenders.

We are:

• Backed by a16z and Y Combinator, with $75M raised in Series A funding

• Cash flow positive and profitable, with mid eight figure ARR achieved in under two years

• Already serving more than 20% of the auto lending industry

• Processing millions of real customer calls and transactions every day

• Fully deployed in production with major financial institutions

• Actively expanding into new financial services segments

• Building together in person in San Francisco

We are deeply integrated with our customers, own the full technology stack, and move quickly to bring modern AI into regulated industries where precision, reliability, and performance matter.

About the Role

We're hiring a Telephony Specialist to own whether Salient's calls reach borrowers. You'll manage number reputation, connect-rate optimization, spam labeling and call filtering, and our relationships with telephony vendors such as Telnyx and Twilio. You'll work closely with our telephony infrastructure engineer, AI agent engineers, customer success, legal, and lender customers.

This is an ownership role. You will define how we measure connect rate, find problems before customers do, and fix them with carriers, analytics providers, and our own team.

What You'll Own

• Number reputation: registration, attestation, CNAM, analytics-engine standing, monitoring, remediation, and number lifecycle.

• Connect-rate optimization by customer, carrier, number, geography, and time of day, with rigorous measurement and experimentation.

• Detecting and resolving spam labeling, carrier blocking, and call filtering.

• Relationships with Telnyx, Twilio, and other carriers: provisioning, porting, routing, pricing, escalations, and new-vendor evaluation.

• Dashboards, alerts, and runbooks that let number health scale with our customer base.

• Clear deliverability reporting and recommendations for lender customers.

• QA on every telephony change: spot-checking call recordings for dead air and choppy audio, and confirming callbacks to new outbound numbers reach the customer's call center or Taylor.

• Coaching customers on configuring Salient dialers or third-party dialers to get the best results and lowest call abandonment rates.

What We're Looking For

• You've owned number reputation or outbound deliverability for a high-volume calling operation.

• You understand STIR/SHAKEN, CNAM, carrier analytics engines, and remediation processes.

• You've managed carrier and CPaaS vendors, and you know how to escalate effectively.

• You're comfortable with SQL and CDRs, and you measure before you change things.

• You communicate clearly with lender operators, compliance teams, and engineers.

• You verify changes yourself with test calls and recordings rather than assuming they worked.

Nice to Have

• Experience with Telnyx, Twilio, Bandwidth, or other carrier networks.

• Experience with branded calling, Rich Call Data, or caller-ID registration programs.

• Background in outbound contact-center operations.

• You know enough SIP and telephony to diagnose problems and brief engineers precisely.

Why This Role

Salient's AI agents can only help borrowers who pick up. You will own the part of the platform that decides whether they do, and build the practices that keep our calls trusted as volume grows.

At Salient, we’re building at the edge of AI - fast, focused, and with real ownership. Sprints and major launches move quickly, and we look for people who are energized by that pace. Our team typically works around 60 hours per week, beginning at 8:00 AM, with four days spent collaborating in person at our San Francisco office.

We also offer a benefits package designed to support our full-time employees: medical, dental, and vision coverage, a generous 401(k), and catered lunches.

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