Deepgram - Director, Text-to-Speech Synthesis Research
Requirements
• Deep expertise in modern TTS, speech generation, or audio generative modeling, with a track record of personally training and improving large-scale neural models. • Command of the modern speech-generation stack and the open problems behind naturalness, expressiveness, controllability, robustness, voice consistency, and inference cost. • A history of setting research direction under genuine uncertainty: prioritizing experiments, allocating compute and researcher time, and killing approaches that aren't working. • Experience leading researchers and research engineers through other technical leaders — developing tech lead managers or equivalent, setting direction across sub-teams — while staying technically influential yourself. • AI as your default mode of work, not an occasional tool. You've rebuilt how you and your team operate around it, and you have a specific, earned view of what it still can't do in speech research. • The ability to make complex technical tradeoffs legible to product, engineering, and executive audiences. • IT'D BE GREAT IF YOU HAD • TTS or generative-audio models deployed at meaningful production scale. • Built or substantially scaled a high-performing AI research organization. • Sophisticated evaluation systems for generative speech; expressive or multilingual generation, voice cloning and adaptation, or controllable generation. • Recognized external contributions — publications, open source, patents, invited talks — in speech synthesis, neural audio codecs, speech language models, or multimodal models. • Experience in fast-moving startup or research environments that routinely take models from idea to production. • Notice: We're aware of individuals impersonating Deepgram recruiters. All legitimate Deepgram recruiting communication comes from an @deepgram.com http://deepgram.com email address. If you've received a message claiming to be Deepgram, please forward it to [email protected].
Responsibilities
• Own the TTS research and model roadmap — decide which technical directions can materially move speech-generation quality, including the expensive and non-obvious ones, and recognize when an approach should change or die. • Drive advances across neural audio modeling, prosody and expressiveness, controllability, multilingual speech, voice identity and consistency, data and training strategy, post-training, and inference performance — and make sure they land as measurable production gains. • Stay deeply technical: review research, challenge assumptions, design experiments, diagnose model failures, and take on the highest-leverage problems yourself. • Build evaluation and benchmarking that explains why models improve, not just whether they did — automated metrics alongside human perceptual assessment. • Lead a mix of individual contributors and tech lead managers. Hire and develop both, hold an exceptionally high technical bar, grow senior researchers into technical leaders, and set direction across sub-teams while pushing decisions down to the people closest to the work. • Partner with engineering and product leadership on ship-readiness, and represent Deepgram's TTS research internally and externally. • YOU'LL LOVE THIS ROLE IF YOU • Want to own a frontier-model program end to end rather than optimize one slice of someone else's agenda. • Care about the breakthrough and the ship in equal measure. • Still love training runs, failed evals, and architecture arguments, even as most of your impact now comes through the people you lead. • Get energy from deciding which bets are worth making when the answer isn't obvious and the experiments are expensive.
Benefits
• San Francisco, NYC, SeattleEstimated Base Salary $262.6K – $328.3K • Offers Equity • Offers Bonus • Everywhere else in the U.S.Estimated Base Salary $213K – $266.3K • Offers Equity • Offers Bonus • This range is determined by work location and additional factors, including job-related skills and experience. There may be instances where a salary higher or lower than this range may be appropriate for a candidate whose qualifications differ meaningfully from those listed in the job description. Please note that the compensation details listed on US role postings reflect the base salary only and does not include bonus, equity or benefits. • Upload your resume here to autofill key application fields. • Drop your resume here! • Parsing your resume. Autofilling key fields... • Please Note: we have set up limits for applications for this role. It is in the General Application Limit Setting group. The following limits apply to applications for all jobs within this group: • General Application Limit Setting • Candidates may not apply more than 2 times in any 60 day span for any job in the General Application Limit Setting Group. • Candidates may not re-apply to the same role within 180 days if not presented with an offer • or drag and drop here • Please list your scholarly literature/academic publications related to speech processing, STT/TTS, or similar. • Write N/A if non-applicable • Please describe your other relevant technical skills for this role. Include the technologies, systems, or tools you have used. For example, what is your level of comfort with training AI models in PyTorch/other libraries? • Describe your experience in 1-2 sentences of leading researchers and research engineers through other technical leaders — developing tech lead managers or equivalent, setting direction across sub-teams — while also staying technically influential. • To keep your interview experience seamless and distraction-free, we use an AI Notetaker to record and transcribe our interviews. This helps interviewers focus fully on the conversation and ensures your responses are captured accurately. The recording will only be used internally for evaluation. If you would prefer not to be recorded, you can opt out on this page. Opting out will not impact your candidacy in any way. • Yes, I consent to be recorded • Opt out of recording • Decline to self-identify • Hispanic or Latino - A person of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of race. • Hispanic or Latino • White (Not Hispanic or Latino) - A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa. • White • Black or African American (Not Hispanic or Latino) - A person having origins in any of the Black racial groups of Africa. • Black or African American • Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander (Not Hispanic or Latino) - A person having origins in any of the peoples of Hawaii, Guam, Samoa, or other Pacific Islands. • Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander • Asian (Not Hispanic or Latino) - A person having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian Subcontinent, including, for example, Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippine Islands, Thailand, and Vietnam. • Asian • American Indian or Alaska Native (Not Hispanic or Latino) - A person having origins in any of the original peoples of North and South America (including Central America), and who maintain tribal affiliation or community attachment. • American Indian or Alaska Native • Two or More Races (Not Hispanic or Latino) - All persons who identify with more than one of the above five races. • Two or More Races • Hispanic or Latino • White (Not Hispanic or Latino) • Black or African American (Not Hispanic or Latino) • Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander (Not Hispanic or Latino) • Asian (Not Hispanic or Latino) • American Indian or Alaska Native (Not Hispanic or Latino) • Two or More Races (Not Hispanic or Latino) • I identify as one or more of the classifications of protected veteran listed above • I am not a protected veteran
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