Audio Engineer David AI · USD 120k-160k/yr San Francisco, CA, US Workplace On-site 10 hours ago

Content Creators; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

Content Creators in San Francisco is seeking an in-house audio expert to set recording specs, standards, and QA for studio sessions. You will guide contributors and vendors, fix home setups, and run the hardware Studio operations reporting to the Head of Operations.

You will define acoustic targets for processed audio and lead a team ensuring outputs meet high quality standards across projects and languages.

Qualifications

• 7+ years in audio engineering, recording, or production.
• A highly trained ear for voice nuances across mics, rooms and chains.
• Deep knowledge of mics, interfaces, acoustics, and room treatment.
• Strong DAW skills with loudness, EQ, dynamics, noise reduction, and restoration tools.
• Ability to troubleshoot remotely and explain fixes clearly.
• Comfortable in a fast-moving startup with ambiguity and ownership.

Responsibilities

• Be the go-to audio authority for Ops, Engineering, and ML.
• Define audio quality standards and recording specs for each program.
• Help contributors diagnose and fix home recording setups.
• Write setup guides, onboarding checks, and troubleshooting docs in multiple languages.
• Lead a team and calibrate to audio standards; identify root causes and fixes.
• Define acoustic targets for processed audio and judge compliance.
• Collaborate with ML researchers to define audio events.

Skills

Audio engineering

Recording production

Mics & acoustics

DAW proficiency

Loudness metering

Remote troubleshooting

Clear communication

Tools

iZotope RX

ffmpeg

SoX

Python

Job description

About David AI

David AI builds and licenses high-quality voice and audio datasets to the world's leading AI labs. We're a ~50-person Series B team running data collection across ~20 language markets, spanning conversational, expressive/emotional TTS, and transcription data.

The Role

You'll be David AI's in-house audio expert. When a contributor's recordings sound off, a program needs a recording spec, or we're setting up a studio session, you're the person who knows exactly what's wrong and how to fix it. You'll set the audio standards everyone else works from, help contributors and vendors get their setups right, and run the hardware and studio side of our in-person recording work. You'll report to the Head of Operations.

What you'll do

• Be the go-to audio authority for Ops, Engineering, and ML, answering the "why does this sound wrong?" questions that nobody else can

• Define audio quality standards and recording specs (noise floor, clipping, reverb, levels, mic placement, sample rate/format) for each program

• Help contributors diagnose and fix their home recording setups, including mic choice, placement, gain staging, room treatment, and interface/software settings

• Write clear setup guides, onboarding checks, and troubleshooting docs that non-experts can follow in any of our ~20 language markets

• Lead a team and calibrate them to the company's audio standards. Listen to problem batches, identify root causes (environment, hardware, settings, processing), and recommend fixes

• Define acoustic targets for processed, synthetic, or AI-generated audio, and judge whether output meets them

In this role, you will:

• Work with ML researchers to identify and define audio events and acoustic quality issues (What counts as “muffled” audio? How do we define “robotic artifacts”?).

• Turn these definitions into actionable guidelines for our expert audio QAs to label internal audio data.

• Manage the QA team in a rapid iteration loop of labeling audio samples, getting feedback from ML researchers, and refining the annotation process to deliver high-quality training and eval sets.

• Conduct quality audits on annotation and post-processing models before they land in production.

What we're looking for

• 7+ years in audio engineering, recording, or production (studio, broadcast, podcast, post, or voice work)

• A highly trained ear for subtle differences across voices, mics, rooms, and signal chains

• Deep hands-on knowledge of mics, interfaces, preamps, acoustics, and room treatment

• Strong DAW skills and fluency with loudness/metering, EQ, dynamics, noise reduction, and restoration tools (e.g., iZotope RX)

• Ability to troubleshoot remotely and explain fixes clearly to non-technical people

• Comfortable in a fast-moving startup: ambiguous problems, shifting priorities, high ownership
  

Nice to have

• Experience with speech or voice data for AI (TTS, ASR, SFT projects) at a lab or data vendor

• Experience recording voice actors or directing dialogue sessions

• Experience supporting remote or distributed recording at scale

• Scripting basics (Python, ffmpeg, SoX) for batch checks or processing

• Multilingual