Director, Text-to-Speech Synthesis Research

Deepgram
San Francisco, Ann Arbor, United States
Workplace: RemoteFull timeUSD 213,000 - 328,300 annuallyFunction: Research & Scientific (R&D)Skills: ["Hands-on leadership","Technical experimentation","Research direction-setting","Hiring and developing talent","Communication of tradeoffs"]

Own the end-to-end Text-to-Speech research program—setting the roadmap, making the hard technical bets, and ensuring advances ship. You’ll lead hands-on experimentation across neural audio modeling, prosody and expressiveness, controllability, multilingual speech, and voice consistency, while building evaluation and benchmarking with both automated and human perceptual measures. You’ll develop researchers and tech lead managers and partner with engineering and product on ship-readiness.

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FursaFursa
Deepgram
Deepgram
17 hours ago

Director, Text-to-Speech Synthesis Research

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Job Summary

Own the end-to-end Text-to-Speech research program—setting the roadmap, making the hard technical bets, and ensuring advances ship. You’ll lead hands-on experimentation across neural audio modeling, prosody and expressiveness, controllability, multilingual speech, and voice consistency, while building evaluation and benchmarking with both automated and human perceptual measures. You’ll develop researchers and tech lead managers and partner with engineering and product on ship-readiness.
Location: San Francisco, Ann Arbor, United States
Workplace: Remote
Employment Type: Full time
Job Function: Research & Scientific (R&D)
Seniority: Director level

Key Responsibilities

  • •Own the TTS research and model roadmap, choosing technical directions that improve quality and deciding when to change or stop approaches.
  • •Drive advances across neural audio modeling, prosody/expressiveness, controllability, multilingual speech, voice identity and consistency, data/training strategy, and inference performance.
  • •Stay deeply technical: review research, challenge assumptions, design experiments, diagnose failures, and tackle the highest-leverage problems.
  • •Build evaluation and benchmarking that explains why models improve, using both automated metrics and human perceptual assessment.
  • •Lead a mix of individual contributors and tech lead managers, hiring/developing talent and partnering with engineering and product on ship-readiness while representing TTS research internally and externally.

Pay and Benefits

Salary: USD 213,000 - 328,300 annually
Equity and Bonus:Equity

Key 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 key open problems (naturalness, expressiveness, controllability, robustness, voice consistency, inference cost).
  • •Experience setting research direction under uncertainty by prioritizing experiments, allocating compute/time, and stopping approaches that don’t work.
  • •Experience leading researchers and research engineers through other technical leaders, while staying technically influential.
  • •Ability to make complex technical tradeoffs legible to product, engineering, and executive audiences.
Experience:Voice AISpeech synthesisAudio generative modelingMultilingual speechAI research to productionStartup environments
Skills:Hands-on leadershipTechnical experimentationResearch direction-settingHiring and developing talentCommunication of tradeoffs

Company Brief

Deepgram
Deepgram builds a real-time Voice AI platform delivering speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and voice-agent APIs for developers and enterprises, focusing on low-latency, high-accuracy voice models and scalable deployment options.
Industry: API Platforms
Company Size: Medium (51 to 250 employees)
Growth: Scaleup
Valuation: Unicorn (USD 1B+)
Funding: Series C
Headquarters: San Francisco, United States
Founded: 2015
Glassdoor
Glassdoor: 4.5
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