Job Description
Director Research Science
\n
Industry: Artificial Intelligence / Automotive Technology
\n
Employment Type: Full-Time
\n
Location: Hybrid / Onsite, Burlington, MA (Hybrid)
\n
\n
About the Opportunity
\n
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.
\n
\n
This role will bridge cutting-edge AI research with real-world product innovation, driving breakthroughs from foundational research into scalable, production-ready solutions.
\n
\n
What You'll Do
\n
- \n
- 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.
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
Qualifications
\n
Required
\n
- \n
- 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.
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
Preferred
\n
- \n
- 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.
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
Ideal Candidate
\n
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.
\n
\n
If you're passionate about defining the future of speech AI while leading world-class researchers, we'd love to connect.