Senior Researcher, Speech (ASR)

About AssemblyAI

At AssemblyAI, we’re creating a leading Applied AI company by building powerful models to transcribe and understand audio data, exposed through a straightforward web API. 

Progress in AI is moving at an unprecedented pace–we keep our pulse on the latest developments and breakthroughs in AI research and use these advances to inform our production-ready AI models. Our Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) models already outperform companies like Google, AWS, and Microsoft - which is why hundreds of companies and thousands of developers are using our API to transcribe and understand millions of videos, podcasts, phone calls, and Zoom meetings every day.

We’ve raised funding by leading investors including Accel, Insight Partners, Y Combinator’s AI Fund, Patrick and John Collision, Nat Friedman, and Daniel Gross. As part of a huge and emerging market, AssemblyAI is well on its way to becoming the leader in applied AI.

Join our world-class, remote team and help us build an iconic AI company!

About the role:

AssemblyAI is growing quickly, and we’re searching for a Senior Researcher, Speech specializing in Speech Technology to join our Speech team!  With significant investment and strong leadership to fuel our growth, it’s the perfect time to join AssemblyAI.

What You’ll Do:

• Provide scientific leadership on ambitious research projects that have the potential for a high impact on AssemblyAI’s products and services, as well as on external research and technology communities
• Engage with research communities through activities such as publishing experimental results or participating in conferences 
• Execute those research projects in a scientifically sound manner
• Stay up-to-date on the latest research in the speech domain and share this knowledge across the company
• Replicate and examine state-of-the-art speech models based on conference/journal publications
• Collaborate with the technology leadership team to prioritize the research agenda, define the scopes of research projects, and take charge of their execution
• Collaborate with the engineering team to deploy new models into production

What You’ll Need:

• PhD in Computer Science or a related field; or Master's degree in Computer Science or a related field plus equivalent practical experience
• 5+ years of experience in speech research based on deep learning or machine learning in either an academic or industry setting specific research topics include, but are not limited to: 
  • ASR (e.g., model architecture, ASR robustness, acoustic/language modeling).
  • Speaker modeling (e.g., speaker verification, speaker identification, speaker diarization)
  • Self-supervised learning for speech or speech-text
  • Multilingual speech modeling (multilingual ASR, speech translation, language identification)
  • Applications of ASR (e.g., spoken dialogue modeling, speech summarization) 
  • Paralinguistics (e.g., speech emotion recognition)
• A track record of widely recognized research publications at leading conferences; or a demonstrated ability to commercialize research results 
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills in technical matters

Nice to Have:

• 2+ years experience in applied research in the speech or related industry 
• Experience of mentoring junior researchers or PhD students in conducting research and getting it published

Pay Transparency:

AssemblyAI strives to recruit and retain exceptional talent from diverse backgrounds while ensuring pay equity for our team. Our salary ranges are based on paying competitively for our size, stage and industry, and are one part of many compensation, benefits and other reward opportunities we provide.

There are many factors that go into salary determinations, including relevant experience, skill level and qualifications assessed during the interview process, and maintaining internal equity with peers on the team. The range shared below is a general expectation for the function as posted, but we are also open to considering candidates who may be more or less experienced than outlined in the job description. In this case, we will communicate any updates in the expected salary range.

Lastly, the provided range is the expected salary for candidates in the U.S. Outside of those regions, there may be a change in the range, which again, will be communicated to candidates.

Salary range: $170K - $230K