Director Speech Input Research

Director Speech Input Research

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.