Job Title: Senior Speech & Audio ML Engineer

Location: Remote

Type: Full-time

Salary Range: $2,500–5,500 USD / month

Role Purpose

We are looking for a Senior ML Engineer to build and ship core models for a speech-driven behavioral engine. You will own end-to-end modeling from raw, long-form audio and layered annotations to production inference.

Responsibilities include:

• Designing audio features and embeddings.
• Training and evaluating a suite of models.
• Delivering reproducible pipelines that meet targets for accuracy, robustness, latency, and cost.

Non-Negotiables

• Experience: 5+ years building production ML systems, including 2+ years in speech/audio.
• Speech & Signal Processing: VAD, diarization, segmentation, denoising, spectral features (log-mel/MFCC), prosody (pitch/energy), long-form audio handling.
• SOTA Audio Models & Embeddings: Wav2Vec2, HuBERT, wavLM (or similar); fine-tuning/self-supervised learning; contrastive/metric learning for downstream tasks.
• Data Engineering & Quality: SQL, Python data stack (Pandas/Polars), ETL for audio + metadata, stratified sampling, leakage prevention, feature stores.
• Evaluation Discipline: Golden sets, robust speaker/content splits, ROC/PR/calibration, fairness/bias checks, ablations, drift/shift detection on embeddings and audio quality.
• MLOps, Serving & Reproducibility: FastAPI/gRPC around HF/torchaudio models, experiment tracking (W&B/MLflow), artifact/model versioning, CI/CD, observability, scalable batch/streaming inference.
• Proven ability to create and document novel IP (methods, architectures, or training/eval techniques) with clear prior-art awareness.

Nice to Have

• Tooling: SpeechBrain, Lightning, OpenSMILE/Praat, Kaldi/Conformer/Emformer, Label Studio.
• Multimodal Skills: ASR (e.g., Whisper) + paralinguistic features; emotion/prosody modeling; speaker embeddings (x-vectors, ECAPA-TDNN).
• Performance & Deployment: Quantization/distillation, Triton/CUDA basics, distributed training, real-time/streaming inference, on-device DSP (Rust/C++).
• Publications/Patents/Competitions: Demonstrating novel audio modeling work.

Details

• Full time
• Payment in USD [5000-5500 USD]
• Remote