Senior Speech AI Scientist (ASR & Multimodal)

Connect; City Of London; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

Connect is seeking a highly experienced Senior Data Scientist to lead research, development, and scaling of conversational AI and multimodal systems with a focus on Speech Processing. You will own end-to-end ASR model lifecycles—from data pipelines to deployment—and drive performance in demanding environments.

You will architect scalable labeling workflows, optimise training via quantisation and distillation, and guide decisions on custom vs foundation models.

Qualifications

• Master's or Ph.D. in Speech Science, AI, Computational Linguistics, Mathematics, or related quantitative field.
• 5+ years in ML/DL/Data Science, with at least 2 years in Generative AI, NLP, or Speech.
• Deep theoretical and practical knowledge of acoustic modelling and ASR architectures (Whisper, Conformer, wav2vec, Nemotron).
• Experience designing data curation strategies and managing audio/text annotation workflows.
• Proficient in Python and PyTorch.

Responsibilities

• Lead the end-to-end lifecycle of core ASR models, from data pipelines to training and deployment.
• Build and optimise custom ASR models for high-accuracy transcription in noisy environments.
• Architect scalable data pipelines for unstructured audio and text, with QA rubrics and human-in-the-loop labelling.
• Guide model evaluation and production inference optimisation, including quantisation and distillation.
• Evaluate emerging architectures and decide when to build or fine-tune Foundations models.
• Collaborate with ML Engineers, Backend Developers, and PMs to meet latency and throughput goals.
• Mentor junior data scientists and engineers, promoting rigorous experimentation and robust engineering.

Skills

Python

PyTorch

Education

Master's or PhD in Speech Science or related quantitative field

Tools

Whisper

Conformer

wav2vec

TensorRT

Job description

Connect is seeking a highly experienced Senior Data Scientist to lead research, development, and scaling of conversational AI and multimodal systems with a focus on Speech Processing. You will own end-to-end ASR model lifecycles—from data pipelines to deployment—and drive performance in demanding environments.

You will architect scalable labeling workflows, optimise training via quantisation and distillation, and guide decisions on custom vs foundation models.