Senior Staff Research Scientist in Speech Technologies (AI)

TL;DR

Senior Staff Research Scientist in Speech Technologies (AI): Developing a safety-focused, clinical-grade ASR foundation for a healthcare-only LLM platform with an accent on medical terminology accuracy and real-world acoustic conditions. Focus on architecting large-scale medical speech datasets, optimizing latency and resource efficiency, and bridging the gap between state-of-the-art research and production systems.

Location: On-site in Bellevue, WA (currently remote with quarterly trips to Menlo Park, CA until office space is secured)

Company

A safety-focused, healthcare-only LLM platform building autonomous, clinical-grade conversational AI with over $404M in funding and a $3.5B valuation.

What you will do

• Define and develop the ASR foundation for clinical-grade conversational AI, from architecture to production.
• Design and validate models to handle complex medical terminology and diverse patient populations.
• Architect pipelines and curation processes for large-scale medical speech datasets.
• Optimize ASR models for latency, accuracy, and resource efficiency in high-stakes environments.
• Collaborate with LLM, product, and clinical teams to integrate speech technologies into the broader platform.
• Contribute to the research culture through experimentation and knowledge sharing.

Requirements

• PhD with 7+ years of ASR research/engineering experience, or Master's with 10+ years of industry experience.
• Deep expertise in designing speech recognition algorithms for streaming and non-streaming contexts.
• Proven track record of training and optimizing ASR models for production.
• Experience preprocessing and curating large speech datasets.
• Strong proficiency in Python, C++, and Linux/Unix command-line environments.
• Must be based in or able to work on-site in Bellevue, WA once the office is established.

Nice to have

• Hands-on experience with ESPnet, Kaldi, and PyTorch.
• Experience with CUDA for GPU-accelerated training and inference.
• Familiarity with leveraging LLMs to enhance speech recognition quality.
• Experience with neural and end-to-end endpointer modeling.
• Publications in tier-1 venues such as Interspeech, ICASSP, or ACL.

Culture & Benefits

• Mission-driven impact where improvements directly enhance patient experiences and healthcare access.
• Work alongside elite researchers and engineers from Google, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Stanford.
• Opportunity to build a purpose-built, safety-critical speech stack from the ground up.
• High equity upside in a rapidly growing, well-funded company.