Machine Learning Researcher (Speech AI)

Location: San Francisco, CA or Remote within the United States

Salary: $140,000–$250,000 annually, with equity and bonus opportunities. The posting also mentions a competitive salary range of $160,000–$250,000.

Company

hirify.global builds AI phone agents and the models and infrastructure that enable natural, reliable voice interactions for enterprises at scale.

What you will do

• Design and train expressive, controllable text-to-speech models and neural audio codec-based architectures.
• Build and fine-tune speech-to-text systems that handle accents, noise, telephony artifacts, code switching, and conversational nuance.
• Research neural audio codecs with high compression, low perceptual loss, and support for controllable speech generation.
• Curate large multilingual audio datasets and develop staged training, filtering, and distributed GPU pipelines.
• Optimize large-model training and real-time inference for latency, throughput, cost, memory efficiency, and reliability.
• Design ablation studies and evaluate research through objective metrics, perceptual testing, offline benchmarks, and production metrics.

Requirements

• Experience with self-supervised, multimodal, or generative modeling and the ability to derive and implement new formulations.
• Hands-on experience building or scaling TTS, STT, or neural audio codec systems.
• Experience with large-scale distributed training and serving models on modern accelerators.
• Knowledge of quantization, kernel optimization, memory efficiency, and real-time or streaming speech constraints.
• Strong experimental skills, including controlled experiments, ablation studies, and meaningful evaluation.
• Research publications or open-source contributions in speech or language AI, or a PhD in ML, AI, or a related field, are expected as evidence of research impact.

Nice to have

• Background in real-time speech systems or telephony.
• Experience with large-scale speech datasets and real-world audio variability.
• Strong intuition for audio quality, prosody, emotional expression, and conversational dynamics.

Culture & Benefits

• Fast-moving startup environment with ownership from research through production deployment.
• Healthcare, dental, and vision benefits.
• Meaningful equity in a fast-growing company.
• Access to the tools needed to support research and development.
• San Francisco office at Levi's Plaza with rooftop views.