Principal Research & Engineering, Realtime Voice AI

Inflection AI
Palo Alto
Workplace: OnsiteFull timeUSD 400,000 - 550,000 annuallyFunction: Research & Scientific (R&D)Education: bachelorsSkills: ["Leadership","Mentorship","Collaboration","Communication","Problem-solving"]

Lead the technical roadmap and implementation of Inflection’s realtime Voice AI stack, including streaming ASR, TTS, speech-to-speech, and speech LLMs. Own evaluation systems for voice quality and production-ready robustness, mentor a cross-disciplinary team, and drive build-vs-buy-vs-train decisions to deliver emotionally intelligent, trustworthy voice interactions in enterprise workflows.

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FursaFursa
Inflection AI
Inflection AI
2 months ago

Principal Research & Engineering, Realtime Voice AI

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Source: Company careers pageValidated by: Fursa AI
Last checked: 17 hours agoStatus: Live

Job Summary

Lead the technical roadmap and implementation of Inflection’s realtime Voice AI stack, including streaming ASR, TTS, speech-to-speech, and speech LLMs. Own evaluation systems for voice quality and production-ready robustness, mentor a cross-disciplinary team, and drive build-vs-buy-vs-train decisions to deliver emotionally intelligent, trustworthy voice interactions in enterprise workflows.
Location: Palo Alto
Workplace: Onsite
Employment Type: Full time
Job Function: Research & Scientific (R&D)

Key Responsibilities

  • •Establish and own the technical roadmap for Inflection's realtime Voice AI stack, covering streaming ASR, TTS, speech-to-speech, speech LLMs, turn-taking, barge-in, latency, and reliability.
  • •Leverage a 1,000 GPU cluster to drive performance benchmarking and extensive experimentation.
  • •Determine build-vs-buy-vs-train strategies for core audio, speech, and realtime interaction components.
  • •Direct research and engineering efforts to improve speech quality, naturalness, expressiveness, emotional fit, controllability, and production readiness.
  • •Collaborate with infrastructure, product, design, and agentic AI teams to deploy voice agents for enterprise workflows.

Pay and Benefits

Salary: USD 400,000 - 550,000 annually
Equity and Bonus:Equity
Perks:401k MatchingPaid LeaveParternal Leave

Key Requirements

  • •Experience leading or serving as a principal Research and Engineering contributor to realtime voice, speech, audio AI, or conversational AI systems in production.
  • •Experience with streaming ASR, TTS, speech-to-speech systems, speech LLMs, audio tokenization, multimodal models, barge-in, low-latency inference, or realtime agents.
  • •Strong technical judgment across both speech modeling and production systems.
  • •Ability to define voice quality in terms of user and customer outcomes, not only offline model metrics.
  • •Experience designing or using evaluation systems that capture real user experience.
Experience:Conversational AIVoice AIResearch & engineering
Education:Bachelor's
Skills:LeadershipMentorshipCollaborationCommunicationProblem-solving
Languages:English
Tech Stack:ASRTTSSpeech LLMsAudio tokenizationLow-latency inferenceStreamingGPU

Company Brief

Inflection AI
Develops conversational AI and personal-assistant technologies, including the Pi chatbot, to enable more natural human–computer interaction and simplify access to information and productivity tools.
Industry: AI & Machine Learning
Company Size: Medium (51 to 250 employees)
Growth: Early Stage Startup
Headquarters: Palo Alto, United States
Founded: 2022
WebsiteLinkedIn