Director of Research, Text to Speech

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in California, +1 more state.

📋 Description

• Take charge of the TTS research and model roadmap, making technical decisions that significantly enhance speech-generation quality.

• Propel advancements in neural audio modeling, prosody and expressiveness, controllability, multilingual speech, voice identity and consistency, data and training strategies, post-training, and inference performance.

• Ensure that research progress translates into quantifiable production improvements.

• Analyze research, question assumptions, design experiments, troubleshoot model failures, and resolve high-impact technical challenges.

• Develop evaluation and benchmarking techniques that integrate automated metrics with human perceptual assessments.

• Lead individual contributors and technical lead managers.

• Recruit and nurture researchers and technical leaders, uphold a high technical standard, and guide direction across sub-teams.

• Collaborate with engineering and product leadership to ensure ship-readiness.

• Represent Deepgram’s TTS research both internally and externally.

• Establish the team and operational model for rapid, high-quality research execution.

⛳️ Requirements

• Profound expertise in contemporary TTS, speech generation, or audio generative modeling.

• Proven history of personally training and enhancing large-scale neural models.

• In-depth knowledge of the modern speech-generation stack and existing challenges regarding naturalness, expressiveness, controllability, robustness, voice consistency, and inference costs.

• Experience in directing research amidst uncertainties, prioritizing experiments, managing compute and researcher time, and discontinuing ineffective methodologies.

• Background in leading researchers and research engineers through other technical leaders, including the development of tech lead managers or equivalent roles.

• Familiarity with AI as a default operational mode, including experience in restructuring workflows around AI and understanding its limitations in speech research.

• Capability to convey complex technical trade-offs to product, engineering, and executive stakeholders.

• Experience with TTS or generative-audio models deployed at significant production scale.

• Proven track record in building or significantly scaling a high-performing AI research organization.

• Experience with evaluation systems for generative speech, expressive or multilingual generation, voice cloning and adaptation, or controllable generation.

• Acknowledged external contributions such as publications, open-source projects, patents, or invited presentations.

• Experience in dynamic startup or research environments where models transition from concept to production.

• Must be legally authorized to work in the location where the position is based.

• Must address visa sponsorship needs in the application.

🏝️ Benefits

• Equity

• Bonus

• Remote work arrangement

• AI Notetaker interview recording and transcription, with the option to opt out without affecting candidacy.