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?

Do you want to create AI that converses as naturally as humans do? A pioneering healthtech unicorn is building AI digital health agents designed to safely and empathetically assist patients.

As the Staff Research Scientist, you'll play a key part in making this a reality - building end-to-end foundational speech models capable of full-duplex communication. This isn't just about taking turns speaking; it's about creating AI that can listen and respond simultaneously with human-like conversation, emotions, and natural language that healthcare demands.

What you'll do

• Design and develop novel speech foundation models for healthcare conversations, working end-to-end from research through to productionizing models
• Work on post-training LLMs for speech to enhance their conversational capabilities
• Tackle unique challenges including response time optimization, maintaining alignment between text and speech outputs, and operating in noisy environments
• Create innovative approaches to synthetic conversational data generation
• Have the opportunity to publish your groundbreaking research

What you'll bring

• PhD with 8+ years in speech technologies or related field
• Experience with Speech LLMs
• Experience training large datasets
• Strong publication record at top-tier conferences in speech/multimodal AI
• 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 and will receive highly competitive comp (up to $350K base DOE) with substantial equity.

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