Research Scientist - Voice AI Foundations

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Requirements:

• Strong mathematical foundation in statistical learning theory, particularly in areas relevant to self-supervised and multimodal learning
• Deep expertise in foundation model architectures, with an understanding of how to scale training across multiple modalities
• Proven ability to bridge theory and practice—someone who can both derive novel mathematical formulations and implement them efficiently
• Demonstrated ability to build data pipelines that can process and curate massive datasets while maintaining quality and diversity
• Track record of designing controlled experiments that isolate the impact of architectural innovations and validate theoretical insights
• Experience optimizing models for real-world deployment, including knowledge of hardware constraints and efficiency techniques
• History of open-source contributions or research publications that have advanced the state of the art in speech/language AI

Responsibilities:

• Build next-generation neural audio codecs that achieve extreme, low bit-rate compression and high fidelity reconstruction across a world-scale corpus of general audio.
• Pioneer steerable generative models that can synthesize the full diversity of human speech from the codec latent representation, from casual conversation to highly emotional expression to complex multi-speaker scenarios with environmental noise and overlapping speech.
• Develop embedding systems that cleanly factorize the codec latent space into interpretable dimensions of speaker, content, style, environment, and channel effects -- enabling precise control over each aspect and the ability to massively amplify an existing seed dataset through “latent recombination”.
• Leverage latent recombination to generate synthetic audio data at previously impossible scales, unlocking joint model and data scaling paradigms for audio. Endeavor to train multimodal speech-to-speech systems that can 1) understand any human irrespective of their demographics, state, or environment and 2) produce empathic, human-like responses that achieve conversational or task-oriented objectives.
• Design model architectures, training schemes, and inference algorithms that are adapted for hardware at the bare metal enabling cost efficient training on billion-hour datasets and powering real-time inference for hundreds of millions of concurrent conversations.