Principal Research & Engineering, Realtime Voice AI (AI)

TL;DR

Principal Research & Engineering (Realtime Voice AI): Defining and building a realtime Voice AI stack across speech models, streaming systems, and runtime with an accent on emotional intelligence, low latency, and production reliability. Focus on establishing technical roadmaps for ASR, TTS, and speech-to-speech systems while optimizing voice agent behavior for enterprise workflows.

Location: Palo Alto, California, United States

Salary: $400,000–$550,000

Company

Inflection AI is a Public Benefit Corporation creating human-centered, emotionally intelligent AI, including the personal AI agent Pi.

What you will do

• Establish the technical roadmap for the realtime Voice AI stack, including streaming ASR, TTS, speech-to-speech, and speech LLMs.
• Utilize a 1,000 GPU cluster to support performance benchmarking and extensive experimentation.
• Determine build-vs-buy-vs-train strategies for core audio, speech, and realtime interaction components.
• Direct research and engineering efforts focused on speech quality, naturalness, expressiveness, and production readiness.
• Collaborate with infrastructure, product, and design teams to deploy voice agents for enterprise workflows.
• Develop evaluation systems to measure voice quality through metrics such as clarity, emotional appropriateness, and latency.

Requirements

• Experience as a principal Research and Engineering contributor to realtime voice, speech, audio AI, or conversational AI systems in production.
• Expertise in streaming ASR, TTS, speech-to-speech systems, speech LLMs, multimodal models, or low-latency inference.
• Strong technical judgment across both speech modeling and production systems.
• Ability to lead senior technical talent while staying hands-on with code and architecture.
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent in a related field.
• Must be based in or eligible to work 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.
• Support for country-specific visa needs for international employees living in the Bay Area.