Director, Text-to-Speech Synthesis Research

PromptCube; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 150.000 - 200.000; Vollzeit

Zusammenfassung

Deepgram is seeking a Director of Text-to-Speech Synthesis Research in London to own the end-to-end TTS program, shaping strategy, experiments, and production models while building a high-impact team. You will drive advancements across neural audio, prosody, multilingual speech, and efficient inference, ensuring measurable production gains and strong collaboration with engineering and product leadership.

The role requires deep technical leadership, a proven track record in training large neural

Qualifikationen

• Deep expertise in modern TTS, speech generation, or audio generative modeling.
• Ability to personally train and improve large-scale neural models.
• Experience leading researchers and research engineers, setting direction across sub-teams.
• Ability to communicate complex technical tradeoffs to product and executives.
• Comfort with an AI-first operating rhythm and fast-changing environment.

Aufgaben

• Own the TTS research and model roadmap end to end, prioritizing directions with meaningful production impact.
• Drive advances across neural audio modeling, prosody, expressiveness, multilingual speech, and inference performance.
• Stay deeply technical: review research, design experiments, diagnose model failures, and tackle high-leverage problems.
• Build evaluation benchmarks with automated metrics and perceptual assessments to explain improvements.
• Lead a team of individual contributors and tech leads, hiring and developing talent while maintain high technical standards.
• Partner with engineering and product leadership on ship-readiness and represent TTS research internally and externally.

Kenntnisse

TTS expertise

Neural model training

Experiment design

Research leadership

AI-first mindset

Communication with stakeholders

Jobbeschreibung

Role overview

Deepgram, a voice AI platform providing real-time speech-to-text, text-to-speech and voice-agent APIs used by over 200,000 developers and 1,300+ organizations, is hiring a Director, Text-to-Speech Synthesis Research in London, UK. This is a hands‑on leadership role owning Deepgram's TTS research program end to end — research strategy, technical bets, and the production models that ship — while building the team and operating model around it.

Responsibilities

• Own the TTS research and model roadmap end to end, deciding which technical directions can materially improve speech‑generation quality, including expensive and non‑obvious bets, and recognizing when an approach should change or be stopped.
• Drive advances across neural audio modeling, prosody and expressiveness, controllability, multilingual speech, voice identity and consistency, data and training strategy, post‑training, and inference performance, ensuring they land as measurable production gains.
• Stay deeply technical: review research, challenge assumptions, design experiments, diagnose model failures, and personally take on the highest‑leverage problems.
• Build evaluation and benchmarking that explains why models improve, not just whether they did, using automated metrics alongside human perceptual assessment.
• Lead a mix of individual contributors and tech lead managers: hire and develop both, hold a high technical bar, grow senior researchers into technical leaders, set direction across sub‑teams, and push decisions down to the people closest to the work.
• Partner with engineering and product leadership on ship‑readiness, and represent Deepgram's TTS research internally and externally.

Qualifications

• 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 the open problems behind naturalness, expressiveness, controllability, robustness, voice consistency, and inference cost.
• A history of setting research direction under genuine uncertainty: prioritizing experiments, allocating compute and researcher time, and killing approaches that are not working.
• Experience leading researchers and research engineers through other technical leaders — developing tech lead managers or equivalent and setting direction across sub‑teams — while staying technically influential yourself.
• AI as a default mode of work rather than an occasional tool: having rebuilt how you and your team operate around it, with a specific, earned view of what it still cannot do in speech research.
• The ability to make complex technical tradeoffs legible to product, engineering, and executive audiences.
• Comfort with an AI‑first operating rhythm: actively using and experimenting with advanced AI tools, integrating AI into workflows, and having AI application measured as part of performance.
• Willingness to work at a rapid pace of change where day‑to‑day work evolves quickly, rather than seeking something highly prescriptive with a traditional 9‑to‑5.

Application conditions

• Full‑time position.
• Listed location: London, UK.
• Employer‑published remote role; the listing states that remote does not imply worldwide eligibility.
• Candidates should check the original listing for residency, work authorization, time zone, language, and travel requirements.
• The role follows Deepgram's AI‑first operating rhythm, where active use and experimentation with advanced AI tools is expected and AI application is measured.
• The employer notes the work moves at a rapid pace and the day‑to‑day may evolve quickly.

Preferred qualifications

• TTS or generative‑audio models deployed at meaningful production scale.
• Having built or substantially scaled a high‑performing AI research organization.
• Sophisticated evaluation systems for generative speech; expressive or multilingual generation, voice cloning and adaptation, or controllable generation.
• Recognized external contributions — publications, open source, patents, invited talks — in speech synthesis, neural audio codecs, speech language models, or multimodal models.
• Experience in fast‑moving startup or research environments that routinely take models from idea to production.

Employer‑published remote role. Listed location(s): London, UK. Remote does not imply worldwide eligibility. Check the original listing for residency, work authorization, time zone, language and travel requirements.

Company Overview

Deepgram is the leading platform underpinning the emerging trillion‑dollar Voice AI economy, providing real‑time APIs for speech‑to‑text (STT), text‑to‑speech (TTS), and building production‑grade voice agents at scale. More than 200,000 developers and 1,300+ organizations build voice offerings that are ‘Powered by Deepgram’, including Twilio, Cloudflare, Sierra, Decagon, Vapi, Daily, Cresta, Granola, and Jack in the Box. Deepgram’s voice‑native foundation models are accessed through cloud APIs or as self‑hosted and on‑premises software, with unmatched accuracy, low latency, and cost efficiency.

Backed by a recent Series C led by leading global investors and strategic partners, Deepgram has processed over 50,000 years of audio and transcribed more than 1 trillion words. There is no organization in the world that understands voice better than Deepgram.

Company Operating Rhythm

At Deepgram, we expect an AI‑first mindset—AI use and comfort aren’t optional, they’re core to how we operate, innovate, and measure performance.

Every team member who works at Deepgram is expected to actively use and experiment with advanced AI tools, and even build your own into your everyday work. We measure how effectively AI is applied to deliver results, and consistent, creative use of the latest AI capabilities is key to success here. Candidates should be comfortable adopting new models and modes quickly, integrating AI into their workflows, and continuously pushing the boundaries of what these technologies can do.

Additionally, we move at the pace of AI. Change is rapid, and you can expect your day‑to‑day work to evolve just as quickly. This may not be the right role if you’re not excited to experiment, adapt, think on your feet, and learn constantly, or if you’re seeking something highly prescriptive with a traditional 9‑to‑5.

The Opportunity

We're looking for a Director of Research to own our Text‑to‑Speech program end to end — the research strategy, the technical bets, and the models that ship. This is a hands‑on leadership role: you set direction and stay in the details, shaping architectures, experiments, training strategy, and evaluation. You'll also build the team and operating model that let exceptional researchers move fast without lowering the bar.

The mandate is broad: advance the state of the art in speech generation, and turn those advances into models in production.

What You'll Do

• Own the TTS research and model roadmap — decide which technical directions can materially move speech‑generation quality, including the expensive and non‑obvious ones, and recognize when an approach should change or die.
• Drive advances across neural audio modeling, prosody and expressiveness, controllability, multilingual speech, voice identity and consistency, data and training strategy, post‑training, and inference performance — and make sure they land as measurable production gains.
• Stay deeply technical: review research, challenge assumptions, design experiments, diagnose model failures, and take on the highest‑leverage problems yourself.
• Build evaluation and benchmarking that explains why models improve, not just whether they did — automated metrics alongside human perceptual assessment.
• Lead a mix of individual contributors and tech lead managers. Hire and develop both, hold an exceptionally high technical bar, grow senior researchers into technical leaders, and set direction across sub‑teams while pushing decisions down to the people closest to the work.
• Partner with engineering and product leadership on ship‑readiness, and represent Deepgram's TTS research internally and externally.

You'll Love This Role If You

• Want to own a frontier‑model program end to end rather than optimize one slice of someone else's agenda.
• Care about the breakthrough and the ship in equal measure.
• Still love training runs, failed evals, and architecture arguments, even as most of your impact now comes through the people you lead.
• Get energy from deciding which bets are worth making when the answer isn't obvious and the experiments are expensive.

You Must Have

• 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 the open problems behind naturalness, expressiveness, controllability, robustness, voice consistency, and inference cost.
• A history of setting research direction under genuine uncertainty: prioritizing experiments, allocating compute and researcher time, and killing approaches that aren't working.
• Experience leading researchers and research engineers through other technical leaders — developing tech lead managers or equivalent, setting direction across sub‑teams — while staying technically influential yourself.
• AI as your default mode of work, not an occasional tool. You've rebuilt how you and your team operate around it, and you have a specific, earned view of what it still cannot do in speech research.
• The ability to make complex technical tradeoffs legible to product, engineering, and executive audiences.

It'd Be Great If You Had

• TTS or generative‑audio models deployed at meaningful production scale.
• Built or substantially scaled a high‑performing AI research organization.
• Sophisticated evaluation systems for generative speech; expressive or multilingual generation, voice cloning and adaptation, or controllable generation.
• Recognized external contributions — publications, open source, patents, invited talks — in speech synthesis, neural audio codecs, speech language models, or multimodal models.
• Experience in fast‑moving startup or research environments that routinely take models from idea to production.

Notice: We're aware of individuals impersonating Deepgram recruiters. All legitimate Deepgram recruiting communication comes from an @deepgram.com email address. If you've received a message claiming to be Deepgram, please forward it to [e-mail].