What are the responsibilities and job description for the Director Research Science position at Recruits Lab?
Director Research Science
Industry: Artificial Intelligence / Automotive Technology
Employment Type: Full-Time
Location: Hybrid / Onsite, Burlington, MA (Hybrid)
About the Opportunity
Our client is seeking an experienced and visionary research leader to head its Speech Input Research organization. This is a unique opportunity to define the long-term strategy for next-generation speech AI technologies while leading a world-class team advancing the state of the art in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), speech representation learning, multilingual speech modeling, speech-to-text, and speech-to-speech systems.
This role will bridge cutting-edge AI research with real-world product innovation, driving breakthroughs from foundational research into scalable, production-ready solutions.
What You'll Do
- Define and execute the long-term research roadmap for speech technologies, including ASR, streaming ASR, speech embeddings, prosody modeling, and end-to-end speech systems.
- Lead and grow a multidisciplinary team of researchers focused on advancing state-of-the-art speech AI.
- Foster a culture of scientific excellence, innovation, and technical rigor while mentoring senior researchers and technical leaders.
- Drive the development of next-generation speech models, including multilingual, low-resource, and self-supervised learning approaches.
- Guide research into modern speech architectures, training methodologies, and large-scale foundation models.
- Partner closely with engineering, product, data, UX, and platform teams to translate research into scalable production systems.
- Oversee model training pipelines, evaluation frameworks, benchmarking, and data quality initiatives.
- Ensure excellence across model performance, latency, robustness, safety, and multilingual capabilities.
- Collaborate with executive leadership to align research priorities with long-term business and product strategy.
- Represent the organization through collaborations with leading academic institutions and the broader AI research community.
Qualifications
Required
- PhD (or equivalent industry experience) in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Speech Processing, Electrical Engineering, or a related discipline.
- 8 years of experience in speech AI research, including ASR, speech modeling, speech foundation models, or related technologies.
- Proven experience leading research teams that deliver impactful scientific contributions and production-ready AI systems.
- Deep expertise in modern speech architectures such as Transformer, Conformer, RNN-T, and self-supervised speech models.
- Strong understanding of large-scale model training, data pipelines, evaluation methodologies, and production deployment.
- Outstanding leadership, communication, and cross-functional collaboration skills.
Preferred
- Experience building multilingual, streaming, or low-resource speech systems.
- Publications or significant contributions to leading conferences such as ICASSP, INTERSPEECH, NeurIPS, ICML, or ICLR.
- Experience translating frontier AI research into commercial products deployed at scale.
- Ability to lead through ambiguity while aligning research, engineering, and product organizations.
Ideal Candidate
The ideal candidate has successfully led high-performing speech AI research organizations, possesses deep expertise in modern speech technologies, and has a demonstrated track record of turning cutting-edge research into production systems that impact millions of users.
If you're passionate about defining the future of speech AI while leading world-class researchers, we'd love to connect.