# Senior Applied Scientist, Speech

**Company:** [Otter](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/otter)
**Location:** Mountain View, CA
**Role:** ML Engineering
**Salary:** $230k – $265k/yr
**Experience:** 5+ years
**Skills:** Asr, Tts, PyTorch, Machine Learning, Foundation Models, Speech Models, Model Fine-Tuning, ML Infrastructure, Data Pipelines, Model Deployment, Inference, Cloud Computing, Conversational Data, Agentic Systems, Multi-Model Orchestration
**Posted:** 2026-08-17

> Leads the development and production deployment of large-scale ASR and TTS systems for conversational intelligence products. The role requires 5+ years of industry experience, deep speech-model expertise, and strong software engineering and ML operations capabilities.

## Job Description

## Responsibilities
- Architect, build, and evolve large-scale **automatic speech recognition (ASR)** and **text-to-speech (TTS)** systems for speech understanding across millions of conversations.
- Design and implement training, fine-tuning, post-training, and inference strategies for speech models using **PyTorch**, balancing quality, latency, cost, and reliability.
- Improve model architectures, loss functions, decoding strategies, and training techniques for speech models.
- Own end-to-end machine learning system lifecycles, from research prototyping through production deployment, monitoring, iteration, and maintenance.
- Partner with product and infrastructure teams to translate research into scalable, production-grade systems.
- Improve model performance, robustness, observability, and operational excellence using real-world conversational data at scale.
- Set technical direction and best practices for ML infrastructure, data pipelines, evaluation frameworks, and deployment workflows in a cloud environment.
- Resolve complex problems involving model behavior, data quality, scaling, and system interactions.
- Mentor engineers, influence team standards, review designs, and contribute to strong technical decision-making.

## Requirements
- Bachelor's or master's degree in Computer Science or a related field; PhD preferred.
- 5+ years of relevant industry experience.
- Deep hands-on experience building and fine-tuning speech or foundation models, with production experience in ASR and/or TTS systems.
- Strong knowledge of modern ML research and the ability to evaluate papers and identify production-worthy innovations.
- Experience deploying, scaling, monitoring, and operating ML systems in production across training, inference, and serving infrastructure.
- Experience with large-scale speech and conversational datasets, including preprocessing, augmentation, quality analysis, and labeling strategies.
- Ability to lead technical projects independently and make sound architectural decisions in ambiguous problem spaces.
- Experience with or strong interest in agentic systems, tool-use frameworks, or multi-model orchestration.

## Compensation
- Base salary range: **$230,000–$265,000 USD per year**.

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