Director Research Science

Director Speech Input Research Industry: Artificial Intelligence / Automotive Technology Employment Type: Full-Time Location: Remote (US)

About the Opportunity Our client is seeking an experienced and visionary research leader to head its Speech Input Research organization. This is a unique opportunity to define the long-term strategy for next-generation speech AI technologies while leading a world-class team advancing the state of the art in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), speech representation learning, multilingual speech modeling, speech-to-text, and speech-to-speech systems.

This role will bridge cutting-edge AI research with real-world product innovation, driving breakthroughs from foundational research into scalable, production-ready solutions.

What You'll Do* Define and execute the long-term research roadmap for speech technologies, including ASR, streaming ASR, speech embeddings, prosody modeling, and end-to-end speech systems. * Lead and grow a multidisciplinary team of researchers focused on advancing state-of-the-art speech AI. * Foster a culture of scientific excellence, innovation, and technical rigor while mentoring senior researchers and technical leaders. * Drive the development of next-generation speech models, including multilingual, low-resource, and self-supervised learning approaches. * Guide research into modern speech architectures, training methodologies, and large-scale foundation models. * Partner closely with engineering, product, data, UX, and platform teams to translate research into scalable production systems. * Oversee model training pipelines, evaluation frameworks, benchmarking, and data quality initiatives. * Ensure excellence across model performance, latency, robustness, safety, and multilingual capabilities. * Collaborate with executive leadership to align research priorities with long-term business and product strategy. * Represent the organization through collaborations with leading academic institutions and the broader AI research community.

Qualifications Required* PhD (or equivalent industry experience) in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Speech Processing, Electrical Engineering, or a related discipline. * 8+ years of experience in speech AI research, including ASR, speech modeling, speech foundation models, or related technologies. * Proven experience leading research teams that deliver impactful scientific contributions and production-ready AI systems. * Deep expertise in modern speech architectures such as Transformer, Conformer, RNN-T, and self-supervised speech models. * Strong understanding of large-scale model training, data pipelines, evaluation methodologies, and production deployment. * Outstanding leadership, communication, and cross-functional collaboration skills.

Preferred* Experience building multilingual, streaming, or low-resource speech systems. * Publications or significant contributions to leading conferences such as ICASSP, INTERSPEECH, NeurIPS, ICML, or ICLR. * Experience translating frontier AI research into commercial products deployed at scale. * Ability to lead through ambiguity while aligning research, engineering, and product organizations.

Ideal Candidate The ideal candidate has successfully led high-performing speech AI research organizations, possesses deep expertise in modern speech technologies, and has a demonstrated track record of turning cutting-edge research into production systems that impact millions of users.

If you're passionate about defining the future of speech AI while leading world-class researchers, we'd love to connect.

#LI-DN1