Demo

AI Diagnostics & Observability Engineer

Sage Care
Palo Alto, CA Full Time
POSTED ON 4/18/2026
AVAILABLE BEFORE 6/13/2026
Role Overview

Own and build the full diagnostic, observability, and RCA infrastructure that makes Sage Care’s AI assistant trustworthy and debuggable—in real time and post-call. This engineer builds the visibility layer across telephony, transcription, reasoning, SOP traversal, and tool-calling; creates dashboards for both engineers and live human supervisors; and implements automated triage notification pipelines that surface issues to the right module owners immediately.

This role sits at the intersection of LLM orchestration, voice pipelines, transcription, SOP engines, and operations, serving as the connective tissue across the stack. Your work enables rapid root-cause analysis, real-time intervention, and continuous improvement of our clinical AI assistants.

Key Responsibilities

Root Cause Analysis, Tracing & Observability

  • Build automated RCA pipelines to detect and classify failure modes:
    • Hallucinations
    • Misrouted intents
    • Leaked/invalid tool calls (Transfer, SayMessage, Hangup, NOOP)
    • Unrecoverable SOP loops
    • Broken state transitions
    • Telephony dropouts / DTMF issues
  • Implement event tracing infrastructure capturing every agentic decision across LLM, telephony, and SOP execution.
  • Compare expected vs. actual SOP behavior using protocol-driven expectations or human-labeled ground truth.
  • Automatically compute performance, safety, reliability, and coverage metrics.
Diagnostic Dashboards & Visualization

  • Build live and post-call dashboards that visualize:
    • Full call timeline
    • SOP/state machine traversal
    • Agent reasoning traces
    • Tool invocation history
    • Divergence from expected behavior
  • Design interactive visualizations: heatmaps, decision-path overlays, branching comparisons, and error hotspots.
  • Build triage dashboards for engineering and operations teams to rapidly understand system health.
Integration with Core AI Modules

  • Voice Telephony Integration
    • Trace call-level events (dropouts, retries, audio playback issues).
    • Detect DTMF misfires and incorrect action routing.
  • Transcriber Module Integration
    • Analyze turn segmentation, word-error-rate drift, boosting performance, and latency.
    • Visualize errors in context (audio, transcript, aligned timecodes).
  • LLM Orchestration Integration
    • Audit intent classification accuracy and subgraph routing.
    • Trace reasoning sequences, missing tool calls, redundant tool calls, or invalid arguments.
    • Validate tool call correctness (maps, SMS, search, internal SOP tools).
Live Monitoring & Human-in-the-Loop

  • Architect a live SOP state-machine tracer with:
    • Real-time transcript overlays
    • Current state next expected state
    • Deviation alerts
  • Build dashboards to monitor 10–15 concurrent calls, highlighting sessions with:
    • Loops
    • Latency spikes
    • Failed tool calls
    • Repeated incorrect decisions
  • Provide human specialists with escalation alerts and context.
Command & Control Interface

Build An Intervention Console For On-call Specialists, Enabling

  • “Skip step”
  • “Say apology”
  • “Escalate to human”
  • “Send SMS”
  • “Repeat last message”
  • Override of SOP steps while maintaining auditability and continuity.

This system must blend seamlessly into existing agent workflows without breaking call integrity.

Failure Classification, Clustering & Pattern Detection

  • Build clustering systems (via embeddings or metadata) to group systemic failure modes:
    • Intent misroutes under noisy audio
    • Repeated missing tool calls
    • Looped state machine traversal
    • Hallucinated follow-ups or invalid summaries
  • Generate recurring-failure reports to guide engineering improvements.
Auto-Triaging & Notification System (NEW)

Design and implement an automated triage and notification system that:

  • Detects failure category and severity in real time.
  • Routes incidents to the correct module owners:
    • Telephony
    • Transcription
    • LLM orchestration
    • SOP/decision-tree team
    • Platform reliability
  • Sends structured payloads containing:
    • Trace graphs
    • Relevant logs
    • Transcript segments
    • SOP divergence snapshots
    • Suggested RCA labels
Notifications May Integrate With

  • PagerDuty
  • Slack (rich message blocks)
  • Jira auto-ticket creation
  • Internal incident pipelines

This ensures rapid operational feedback loops and reduces time-to-resolution.

Post-Call RCA Pipelines & Analytics

  • Extend pipelines to automatically generate human-readable failure summaries with:
    • Call-level trace graphs
    • Tool call sequences
    • Transcript context
    • Classified failure types
    • Suggested root causes
  • Store snapshots for operational handoff and debugging.
Required Qualifications

  • Strong backend engineer experienced with diagnostics, observability, and event-driven tracing.
  • Expert in Python, logging systems, real-time pipelines, and distributed debugging.
  • Deep familiarity with:
    • LLM agents
    • LangGraph or state-machine frameworks
    • Tool-calling architectures
    • Telemetry or tracing frameworks
  • Comfortable designing both:
    • Backend data pipelines
    • Frontend dashboards in React, D3, WebSockets, or equivalent.
Preferred Qualifications

  • Telephony/Voice: SIP, WebRTC, Twilio, audio streaming pipelines.
  • Clinical operations, call-center workflows, or mission-critical HITL supervision systems.
  • Observability stacks (Grafana, ELK, OpenTelemetry, Sentry).
  • Clustering/ML techniques for failure pattern discovery.

Salary.com Estimation for AI Diagnostics & Observability Engineer in Palo Alto, CA
$99,794 to $123,057
If your compensation planning software is too rigid to deploy winning incentive strategies, it’s time to find an adaptable solution. Compensation Planning
Enhance your organization's compensation strategy with salary data sets that HR and team managers can use to pay your staff right. Surveys & Data Sets
Employees: Get a Salary Increase
View Core, Job Family, and Industry Job Skills and Competency Data for more than 15,000 Job Titles Skills Library

Job openings at Sage Care

  • Sage Care Palo Alto, CA
  • About Sage Care Sage Care is a fast-growing, early-stage healthcare startup founded by exceptional leaders from Apple, Uber, Carbon Health and backed by to... more
  • 10 Days Ago

  • Sage Care Palo Alto, CA
  • About Sage Care Sage Care is a fast-growing, early-stage healthcare startup founded by exceptional leaders from Apple, Uber, Carbon Health and backed by to... more
  • 10 Days Ago

  • Sage Care Palo Alto, CA
  • About Sage Care Sage Care is a fast-growing, early-stage healthcare startup founded by exceptional leaders from Apple, Uber, Carbon Health and backed by to... more
  • 14 Days Ago


Not the job you're looking for? Here are some other AI Diagnostics & Observability Engineer jobs in the Palo Alto, CA area that may be a better fit.

  • NVIDIA and Careers Santa Clara, CA
  • NVIDIA is a pioneer in accelerated computing, known for inventing the GPU and driving breakthroughs in gaming, computer graphics, high-performance computin... more
  • 1 Month Ago

  • Selector Santa Clara, CA
  • OUR STORYOUR TEAMOUR FOCUSPORTFOLIOJOBSCONTACT Our Story Our Team Our Focus Portfolio Jobs Contact Companies you'll love to work for. Search jobs Explore c... more
  • 22 Days Ago

AI Assistant is available now!

Feel free to start your new journey!