Speech Research Lead

Job Description

Want to build speech AI that actually sounds human?

You'll be joining a well-funded speech AI startup with strong customer traction. They're building ultra-realistic voice technology that handles natural laughter, breathing, seamless language switching, and accurate pronunciation across languages and accents.

As their Speech Research Lead, you'll have the resources and real-world applications to work on frontier speech research: real-time two-way conversations with emotional awareness, novel architectures that balance speed with control, and advancing their multi-lingual capabilities.

What you'll do

• Lead SOTA research advancing their core speech models and product capabilities
  
• Oversee large-scale model training and data system development
  
• Lead and grow the ML team during a critical scaling phase
  

What you'll bring

• Extensive experience in speech synthesis or generative modeling across multiple modalities
  
• Strong background in LLMs and modern language model architectures
  
• Proven ability to take research from concept to deployed systems
  
• Experience training large-scale models in production environments
  

Nice to have

• Understanding of cross-lingual speech challenges and linguistic fundamentals
  
• Published research in speech or generative modeling
  

Ideally based in San Francisco but open to remote internationally. Competitive compensation up to $400K base (depending on experience) plus substantial equity package.