Senior Researcher, Speech Synthesis and Multimodal LLM

L&Q OASIS LIMITED; Greater London; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

Lightspeed Studios' Lightspeed Tech Center is seeking a PhD-level researcher to push the boundaries of speech synthesis, voice generation, and multimodal LLMs for real-time applications. You will collaborate with research and engineering teams from prototyping to production, delivering scalable audio solutions across games and related media.

The role focuses on advancing diffusion/ autoregressive style models, streaming dialogue, and speech-text integration, with opportunities to publish in top

Qualifications

• Ph.D. in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Signal Processing, or a closely related field.
• Strong foundation in speech/audio processing and modern generative models.
• Hands-on experience extending LLMs to speech/audio modalities and real-time interaction modeling.

Responsibilities

• Research and develop advanced speech synthesis and generation algorithms (e.g., TTS, voice conversion, sound/music generation) based on LLMs, multimodal/omnimodal LLMs.
• Develop and optimize speech and audio synthesis systems for online applications, improving effectiveness, efficiency, and scalability.
• Explore and advance full-duplex/streaming multimodal LLM capabilities in speech understanding, generation, and real-time spoken interaction.

Skills

Speech processing

Generative models

Python

PyTorch

Distributed training

Publications

Education

Ph.D. in CS/EE/Signal Processing

Tools

PyTorch

Python

Job description

Business Unit LIGHTSPEED STUDIOS is made up of passionate players who advance the art & science of game development through great stories, great gameplay, and advanced technology. We are focused on bringing next generation experiences to gamers who want to enjoy them anywhere, anytime, across multiple genres and devices.

About the Hiring Team

Lightspeed Tech Center is a R&D department under Lightspeed Studios which develop PUBG Mobile and other high-quality games. Our Tech Center leads the research, exploration, and discovery of innovative technologies and provides technical services for all games during all phases of life cycle, including engine, audio, QA, AI, next generation game, technical cooperation, etc.

What the Role Entails

1. Research and develop advanced speech synthesis and generation algorithms (e.g., TTS, voice conversion, sound/music generation) based on LLMs, multimodal/omnimodal LLMs.
2. Develop and optimize speech and audio synthesis systems for online applications, improving effectiveness, efficiency, and scalability.
3. Explore and advance full-duplex/streaming multimodal LLM capabilities in speech understanding, generation, and real-time spoken interaction.
4. Collaborate cross-functionally with research and engineering teams from prototyping to production.

Who We Look For

1. Ph.D. in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Signal Processing, or a closely related field.
2. Strong foundation in speech/audio processing and modern generative models (e.g., diffusion, flow matching, autoregressive, codec-based approaches).
3. Hands-on experience extending LLMs to speech/audio modalities (e.g., speech tokenizers, multimodal adapters, speech-text joint training). Experience with full-duplex or streaming spoken dialogue systems and real-time interaction modeling is a plus.
4. Proficient in Python and deep learning frameworks (e.g., PyTorch); experience with distributed training is a plus.
5. Track record of publications at top-tier venues (e.g., ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, ACL, ICASSP, Interspeech).

Equal Employment Opportunity at Tencent

As an equal opportunity employer, we firmly believe that diverse voices fuel our innovation and allow us to better serve our users and the community. We foster an environment where every employee of Tencent feels supported and inspired to achieve individual and common goals.

Who we are

Tencent is a world-leading internet and technology company that develops innovative products and services to improve the quality of life for people around the world.

Equal Employment Opportunity at Tencent

As an equal opportunity employer, we firmly believe that diverse voices fuel our innovation and allow us to better serve our users and the community. We foster an environment where every employee of Tencent feels supported and inspired to achieve individual and common goals.