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 a Staff Research Engineer, you'll work hands-on to expand their foundation models and push the boundaries of what's possible in speech AI: exploring multilingual capabilities, long-context generation, full-duplex modeling for natural conversations with interruptions, and novel architectures that balance speed with control.

What you'll do

• Conduct research to advance their core speech models and extend product capabilities
• Develop and experiment with new model architectures and training approaches
• Work on large-scale model training and data systems
• Collaborate with the team to take research from concept to deployed systems

What you'll bring

• 3+ years of experience in speech synthesis, audio generation, or generative modeling
• Experience with audio generation using LLMs
• Solid background in modern language model architectures
• Proven ability to ship research into production systems
• Experience training large-scale models

Nice to have

• Published research in speech or generative modeling
• Experience with real-time speech systems or multimodal models

Ideally in SF, but can also consider remote worldwide. Comp is up to $250K base DOE, plus equity.

Looking to tackle novel speech challenges at scale?

You'll be joining a small but mighty speech AI company building proprietary speech tech from the ground up. With a strong customer base, your research will directly impact production systems serving enterprise customers, with the opportunity to see your work deployed at scale in real-world voice applications.

They're a well-funded startup with healthy revenue streams and immediate opportunities for high-impact research.

Your research

You'll be working on breakthrough speech research that push the boundaries of naturalness and real-time performance. The company has achieved ultra-low latency and is now advancing toward unified speech-to-speech architectures.

You'll develop emotional expression and natural speech generation, advance multilingual support across 30+ languages, and enhance voice cloning robustness.

Your focus

• Lead cutting-edge research in SOTA speech models (TTS, ASR, or speech-to-speech)
• Design, execute and iterate on experiments end-to-end
• Drive speech controllability and naturalness improvements
• Develop evaluation methodologies for speech quality assessment

What you'll bring

• Deep understanding of cutting-edge speech models with end-to-end pipeline experience
• Experience with large-scale model training
• Strong background in speech model development and optimisation
• Published work with demonstrable results in industry or academic settings

Nice to have

• Performance optimisation experience for latency and compute efficiency
• Experience with model fusion and unified architectures

This is a remote role, either in US or Europe. Competitive comp based on experience.

Do you want to create emotionally expressive AI that transforms healthcare conversations?

A pioneering healthtech unicorn is building AI digital health agents designed to safely and empathetically assist patients. Their immediate focus is developing conversational AI with genuine emotional intelligence, with longer-term vision for full-duplex communication capabilities.

As the Staff Research Scientist, you'll play a key part in making this a reality - building foundational speech models that understand and respond with human-like emotion and natural conversation that healthcare demands.

What you'll do

• Design and develop emotionally expressive speech models for healthcare conversations, working end-to-end from research through to productionizing models
• Build conversational AI systems that can interpret and respond with appropriate emotional intelligence
• Work on post-training techniques to enhance speech models' conversational and emotional capabilities
• Tackle unique challenges including response time optimization, maintaining emotional consistency, and operating in noisy healthcare environments
• Have the opportunity to publish your groundbreaking research

What you'll bring

• 5+ years in speech technologies or related field
• Hands-on experience with speech-to-speech systems (highly preferred), or strong experience in Text-to-Speech, Speech LLMs, emotional/expressive speech synthesis, or similar
• Experience training large speech datasets
• Ability to implement research papers from scratch

Bonus points for

• Experience pre-training foundation models with speech (HuBERT, Wav2Vec, or similar)
• Multimodal experience
• Experience with inference technologies (vLLM, CUDA)

You'll be based in the Bay Area or willing to relocate. You'll receive highly competitive comp (up to $350K base DOE) with substantial equity.

If you're excited about creating the next generation of emotionally intelligent speech AI that will revolutionise healthcare communication, click apply!

The future of communication should be bias and barrier-free. That's the vision behind this well-funded start-up pioneering real-time speech algorithms.
 
You'll join a research team on tech that is the first of its kind, improving how we communicate in the real world. By offering clear, natural-sounding conversations regardless of accent or environment. Their ground-breaking technology is already providing impressive results, so it's no wonder they're growing x4 annually.
 
They are creating the whitespace in speech research, and you'll play a key role.
 
As an Senior ML Scientist, you'll work within a talented R&D team advancing core speech algorithms and audio AI models.
 
The role
 
- Contribute to cutting-edge R&D advancing core speech algorithms and Generative Audio models. Continually push boundaries to the next level.
- Tackle unsolved problems in Generative Speech and Audio such as preserving naturalness and performance in noisy environments.
- End-to-end ownership of models, from data collection to training on the cloud.
- Develop novel architectures balancing cutting-edge performance with real-time efficiency & low-latency
- Collaborate with top scientists in this field 
 
You'll have
 
- 4+ years of industry experience developing and implementing either of the following: TTS, Voice Conversion/Cloning, Speech Synthesis, Speech Translation, Accent Translation, Speech Restoration
- Proven background contributing to well-known research publications and/or products in these areas
- PhD or degree in Computer Science, ML, or related field. 
- Proven experience with PyTorch, TensorFlow and modern DL techniques such as GANs, VAEs, diffusion or flow models, etc.
- Familiar with cloud-based technologies and production environments
 
What you'll get in return
 
- Benefits include a competitive salary, share options, unlimited PTO health coverage, and a VPO plan.
- Contributing to whitespace in speech technology research, you'll have control over the direction of your work with no friction whatsoever. You're the expert after all.
 
If you're looking to make an impact, there are few better places to do it. Your work here has the power to improve communication, eliminate confusion, and create a more connected world.
 
If you want the freedom to shape the future of speech AI, apply now.