Staff Research Scientist — San Francisco Bay Area

Build expressive speech foundation models at trillion-parameter scale, with real world impact.

This team has built their entire speech stack in-house, including proprietary LLM-based ASR and TTS, both already outperforming SOTA benchmarks. They're already powering real-time, human-to-AI conversations at scale, every day.

Now they're working at trillion-parameter scale to push toward a genuine end-to-end speech-to-speech LLM, one that understands and responds with genuine emotional intelligence and able to have natural, human-like conversations.

That means solving problems like long-context reasoning, pronunciation accuracy and maintaining consistency in noisy, real-world environments, in a domain where no model has cracked this yet.

They're hiring Senior and Staff-level Speech Scientists (Principal-level also considered) to help drive this frontier work.

What you'll do:

• Build SOTA speech models from the ground up, at genuinely large scale

• Own problems end-to-end, from research through to production

• Solve hard, domain-specific speech challenges as part of the push toward speech-to-speech LLM research

• Help shape technical direction as part of a team working at the frontier of this space

What you'll bring:

• Deep, hands-on expertise in at least one of: Speech/Audio LLMs, TTS or audio generation, or speech-to-speech

• Experience shipping speech systems at real scale, not just research-stage prototypes

Nice to have:

• Experience with pre-training speech foundation models (HuBERT, Wav2Vec or similar)

• Experience with Multimodal LLMs especially to reduce hallucinations

• Experience with Speech LLMs for low latency streaming ASR

Package: Up to $350K–$400K base (DOE), plus substantial equity.

This is an onsite position in South Bay or Seattle.