Director of Research (Text-to-Speech)

Location: Remote within the United States; listed locations include Ann Arbor, Michigan and San Francisco, California.

Base salary: $213,000–$266,300 in most U.S. locations; $262,600–$328,300 in San Francisco, New York City, and Seattle. Equity and bonus are also offered.

Company

Deepgram provides real-time voice AI APIs and self-hosted software for speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and production voice agents.

What you will do

• Own the text-to-speech research and model roadmap from technical strategy through production delivery.
• Advance neural audio modeling, prosody, expressiveness, controllability, multilingual speech, voice identity, training, post-training, and inference performance.
• Review research, design experiments, diagnose model failures, challenge assumptions, and solve high-leverage technical problems.
• Build automated and human evaluation systems that explain why generative speech models improve.
• Lead individual contributors and technical lead managers while hiring, developing, and setting direction across research sub-teams.
• Partner with engineering and product leadership on ship-readiness and represent TTS research internally and externally.

Requirements

• Deep expertise in modern TTS, speech generation, or audio generative modeling, including personally training and improving large-scale neural models.
• Strong command of speech-generation challenges involving naturalness, expressiveness, controllability, robustness, voice consistency, and inference cost.
• Experience setting research direction, prioritizing experiments, allocating compute and researcher time, and discontinuing ineffective approaches.
• Experience leading researchers and research engineers through other technical leaders while remaining technically influential.
• Experience deploying TTS or generative-audio models at meaningful production scale.
• AI must be a default mode of work, with active use and experimentation with advanced AI tools.

Nice to have

• Experience building or substantially scaling a high-performing AI research organization.
• Sophisticated evaluation systems for generative speech, expressive or multilingual generation, voice cloning and adaptation, or controllable generation.
• Publications, open-source contributions, patents, or invited talks in speech synthesis, neural audio codecs, speech language models, or multimodal models.
• Experience in fast-moving startup or research environments taking models from idea to production.

Culture & Benefits

• AI-first operating model with continuous experimentation and rapid adaptation.
• Remote work within the United States.
• Equity and performance bonus in addition to base salary.
• Work focused on frontier voice AI research and production-scale model deployment.