Research Engineer, Voice (AI)

TL;DR

Research Engineer, Voice (AI): Developing and optimizing neural models for speech synthesis, recognition, and audio generation to advance the spoken intelligence of the Pi AI agent with an accent on real-time spoken dialogue and neural audio codecs. Focus on building production-grade training pipelines, exploring diffusion-based synthesis, and integrating multimodal foundation models into a conversational stack.

Location: Palo Alto, California, United States (must be based in the Bay Area)

Salary: $225,000 – $325,000

Company

hirify.global is a Public Benefit Corporation creating Pi, an emotionally intelligent AI designed to help people navigate decisions, emotions, and challenges.

What you will do

• Research, develop, and optimize neural models for text-to-speech, automatic speech recognition, audio generation, and spoken dialogue systems.
• Build and maintain production-grade training and inference pipelines with a focus on latency, naturalness, and scalability.
• Run end-to-end experiments including data curation, architecture design, training, and ablation studies.
• Collaborate with ML engineers and product teams to integrate voice models into Pi’s real-time conversational stack.
• Apply advances in neural audio codecs, diffusion-based synthesis, and multimodal foundation models.
• Develop robust evaluation frameworks using perceptual metrics and automated benchmarks.

Requirements

• 2-5 years of research or engineering experience in audio, speech, or multimodal ML (graduate work included).
• Strong proficiency in PyTorch and experience training large-scale neural models on GPU/accelerator clusters.
• Deep understanding of audio fundamentals: spectrograms, mel features, vocoders, and signal processing.
• Proven ability to move research from prototype to production with efficient, CUDA-aware training loops.
• Familiarity with generative architectures such as diffusion models and autoregressive codecs.
• Bachelor’s degree in CS, Electrical Engineering, Linguistics, or related field; MS or PhD strongly preferred.
• Must be based in or able to live in the Bay Area.

Culture & Benefits

• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance options.
• 401k matching program.
• Unlimited paid time off.
• Parental leave and flexibility for all parents and caregivers.
• Meaningful equity component to share in the company's long-term success.
• Support for country-specific visa needs for international employees living in the Bay Area.