Job Description

Ready to pioneer the speech intelligence behind the next generation of embodied AI?

Join a pioneering startup developing foundational technology for natural conversation in embodied agents. You'll advance the speech systems that power avatars with authentic behaviours, real-time expression, and conversational intelligence that handles interruptions and turn-taking just like humans.

This Lead Research Scientist role focuses on advancing real-time speech systems for interactive avatars. You'll develop full-duplex dialogue models and speech-to-speech architectures that enable natural conversational flow, interruption handling, and emotional expression.

Founded by ex-Googlers, they're building proprietary behaviour models that learn from two-way interactions, creating systems where speech timing, prosody, and contextual responses work in harmony with facial expressions and physical behaviours to drive authentic embodied intelligence.

Your focus:

• Research & develop full-duplex speech systems with natural interruption handling
• Develop expressive voice models with controllable prosody and timing
• Build speech-to-speech architectures preserving identity and emotion
• Create real-time audio generation systems for conversational avatars
• Publish research while deploying systems in production
• Collaborate across teams integrating speech with visual behaviour

Requirements:

• PhD in Speech, Machine Learning, or related field
• First-author publications at top conferences (Interspeech, ICASSP, NeurIPS, ICLR, etc)
• Expertise in text-to-speech, speech-to-speech models, or voice cloning
• Large-scale training experience
• Experience in prosody modelling or real-time audio generation

Nice to have:

• Experience with full-duplex speech research
• Speech-visual alignment expertise (lip sync, expressions)
• Real-time audio deployment optimisation

Package:

• Competitive salary $200k- $300k base (based on experience)
• Meaningful equity package
• Comprehensive healthcare (90% covered)
• Unlimited PTO
• Fully remote work with regular team offsites
• Life insurance and disability coverage

Location: Fully remote position, globally, with preference for Pacific Time alignment.

Ready to make AI conversations feel authentically human?