Director of AI Research
$244k - $313k • Mountain View, CA
Posted 16h ago
Job Location
Mountain View, CA
Tech Stack
Remote Work Policy
On-site
Categories
AI Research Engineer
About the job
We are building AI that changes how people capture, understand, and act on conversations and meetings. As Director of AI Research, you will lead research and development across automatic speech recognition (ASR), speaker identification (SID), large language models (LLMs), and audio language models. Your work will shape our AI capabilities, product direction, and long-term research strategy. This is a hands-on leadership role for someone who combines research depth with experience building and deploying AI systems at scale. You will set technical priorities, guide model and infrastructure decisions, and work directly with the team on challenging research and engineering problems. Partnering closely with Product, Engineering, and Data teams, you will turn research advances into reliable product capabilities. You will also build the team, experimentation practices, and technical foundation needed to move quickly while maintaining high standards for quality and performance.
Responsibilities
- Define and execute a research roadmap across speech recognition, speaker identification, LLMs, and audio language models, connecting technical advances to user needs and business priorities.
- Guide data preparation, model architecture, pre-training, post-training, evaluation, and deployment, establishing rigorous methods for measuring quality and improving models.
- Hire, mentor, and grow a high-performing AI research team, fostering a culture of scientific rigor and collaboration.
- Drive improvements in model accuracy, latency, reliability, and cost through large-scale training, inference optimization, and efficient compute usage.
- Evaluate emerging methods, reproduce promising results, and adapt advances from the literature to practical product challenges.
- Partner with Engineering and Data teams to strengthen the infrastructure, tooling, and workflows that support rapid experimentation and reliable deployment.
- Explore AI capabilities that expand product offerings and support the company’s long-term vision.
Requirements
- Master’s degree or higher in Computer Science or a related technical field; PhD preferred.
- 10+ years of software engineering or AI research and development experience, including 4+ years of experience managing technical teams.
- Track record of leading AI research with meaningful scientific and product impact, supported by publications and deployed systems.
- Deep expertise in speech technologies and LLMs, with hands-on experience in transformer architectures, reinforcement learning, and multimodal model training.
- Experience designing, training, evaluating, and optimizing large-scale ML systems, including distributed training and inference in GPU environments.
- Strong proficiency in Python and PyTorch.
- Experience using Kubernetes and related infrastructure to run ML workloads at scale.
- Demonstrated ability to set technical direction, develop teams, and collaborate across Research, Product, Engineering, and Data.
- Sound judgment in balancing research ambition, execution speed, and product quality.
- Familiarity with application frameworks and technologies such as Django, FastAPI, and WebSockets.
- Commitment to solving difficult technical problems and delivering measurable value to users.