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.

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.