Senior Applied Scientist, Speech

The Opportunity
Do you want to lead projects to build and deploy cutting-edge AI technology to help people get unparalleled value from meetings and conversations? Join our core AI team responsible for ML and work alongside industry-veteran scientists and engineers. As a Senior Applied Scientist, you’ll bring your strong software engineering mindset to machine learning in order to scale and optimize our speech systems—creating and transforming innovative research into production-ready features that power Otter’s summarization and conversational intelligence products.

Your Impact

• Architect, build, and evolve large-scale ASR and TTS systems that power mission-critical product experiences including speech understanding across millions of conversations.
• Lead the design and implementation of training, fine-tuning, post-training, and inference strategies for speech models using PyTorch making principled trade-offs across quality, latency, cost, and reliability.
• Design and improve model architectures, loss functions, decoding strategies, and training techniques for speech models, informed by both research and production constraints.
• Own end-to-end ML system lifecycles, from research prototyping through production deployment, monitoring, iteration, and long-term maintenance.
• Partner deeply with product, and infrastructure teams to develop and translate cutting-edge research into scalable, production-grade systems that deliver measurable user and business impact.
• Drive system-level improvements in model performance, robustness, observability, and operational excellence using real-world conversational data at scale.
• Set technical direction and best practices for ML infrastructure, data pipelines, evaluation frameworks, and deployment workflows in a cloud environment.
• Identify and resolve complex, ambiguous problems in model behavior, data quality, scaling, and system interactions, often before they surface as user-visible issues.
• Mentor and elevate other engineers, influencing team standards, reviewing designs, and contributing to a culture of strong technical decision-making and execution.

We're Looking for Someone Who

• Holds a Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science or a related field with 5+ years of relevant industry experience; PhD is preferred.
• Has deep, hands-on experience building and fine-tuning speech or foundation models, with production experience in ASR and/or TTS systems.
• Demonstrates strong command of modern ML research, with the ability to critically evaluate new papers and drive innovation by identifying what is production-worthy versus experimental.
• Has experience deploying, scaling, monitoring, and operating ML systems in production across training, inference, and serving infrastructure.
• Is comfortable working with large-scale speech and conversational datasets, including data preprocessing, augmentation, quality analysis, and labeling strategies to support model training and evaluation.
• Can lead technical projects independently, driving clarity in ambiguous problem spaces and making sound architectural decisions.
• Has experience with or strong interest in agentic systems, tool-use frameworks, or multi-model orchestration.

About Otter.ai