Director of AI Research

Otter.ai; Mountain View (CA); On-site; USD 244,000 - 313,000; Full time

Job summary

Otter.ai in Mountain View, CA is seeking a Director of AI Research to lead research and deployment of ASR, SID, LLMs, and audio-language models. You will set technical priorities, guide model and infrastructure decisions, and work hands-on with the team to drive challenging AI initiatives.

You will also build and mentor a high-performing research team, establish experimentation practices, and partner with product, engineering, and data teams to translate research advances into reliable product

Qualifications

• Master's degree or PhD preferred.
• 10+ years of software engineering or AI research, incl. 4+ years of people management.
• Track record of AI research with publications and deployed systems.
• Deep expertise in speech tech and LLMs, with transformer architectures, RL, and multimodal training.
• Experience designing, training, evaluating, and optimizing large-scale ML systems with distributed training and GPU inference.
• Strong Python and PyTorch; Kubernetes experience for ML workloads at scale.
• Ability to set technical direction and collaborate across Research, Product, Engineering, and Data.
• Familiarity with Django, FastAPI, and WebSockets.

Responsibilities

• Define and execute a research roadmap across ASR, SID, LLMs, and audio models.
• Guide data preparation, model architecture, pre-training, post-training, evaluation, and deployment.
• Lead and mentor a high-performing AI research team.
• Scale training and inference to improve accuracy, latency, reliability, and cost.
• Translate research into product capabilities and experiments.
• Shape the AI platform with engineering and data teams.
• Identify new opportunities to extend product capabilities.

Skills

Speech recognition

LLMs

Transformer architectures

Python

PyTorch

Kubernetes

Large-scale ML

Research leadership

Education

Master's degree or higher in CS or related field

PhD preferred

Tools

Django

FastAPI

WebSockets

Job description

About the Role

We’re building AI that changes how people capture, understand, and act on conversations and meetings. As Director of AI Research, you will lead research and development across automatic speech recognition (ASR), speaker identification (SID), large language models (LLMs), and audio language models. Your work will shape our AI capabilities, product direction, and long-term research strategy.

This is a hands-on leadership role for someone who combines research depth with experience building and deploying AI systems at scale. You will set technical priorities, guide model and infrastructure decisions, and work directly with the team on challenging research and engineering problems.

Partnering closely with Product, Engineering, and Data teams, you will turn research advances into reliable product capabilities. You will also build the team, experimentation practices, and technical foundation needed to move quickly while maintaining high standards for quality and performance.

Your Impact

• Set the research direction: Define and execute a research roadmap across speech recognition, speaker identification, LLMs, and audio language models, connecting technical advances to user needs and business priorities.
• Own the model lifecycle: Guide data preparation, model architecture, pre‑training, post‑training, evaluation, and deployment. Establish rigorous methods for measuring quality and improving models using large-scale training data.
• Lead and develop the team: Hire, mentor, and grow a high‑performing AI research team. Build a culture of scientific rigor, open collaboration, and clear accountability. Encourage strong viewpoints backed by measurable results and a collaborative mindset that helps the team reach shared decisions.
• Scale training and inference: Drive improvements in model accuracy, latency, reliability, and cost through large-scale training, inference optimization, and efficient use of compute.
• Translate research into products : Evaluate emerging methods, reproduce promising results, and adapt advances from the literature to practical product challenges.
• Shape the AI platform: Partner with Engineering and Data teams to strengthen the infrastructure, tooling, and workflows that support rapid experimentation and reliable deployment.
• Identify new opportunities: Explore AI capabilities that expand what our products can do and support the company’s long‑term vision.

We’re looking for someone who brings

• A Master’s degree or higher in Computer Science or a related technical field; a PhD is preferred.
• 10+ years of software engineering or AI research and development experience, including 4+ years of experience managing technical teams.
• A track record of leading AI research with meaningful scientific and product impact, supported by publications and deployed systems.
• Deep expertise in speech technologies and LLMs, with hands‑on experience in transformer architectures, reinforcement learning, and multimodal model training.
• Experience designing, training, evaluating, and optimizing large‑scale ML systems, including distributed training and inference in GPU environments.
• Strong proficiency in Python and PyTorch, with experience using Kubernetes and related infrastructure to run ML workloads at scale.
• Demonstrated ability to set technical direction, develop teams, and collaborate across Research, Product, Engineering, and Data.
• Sound judgment in balancing research ambition, execution speed, and product quality.
• Familiarity with application frameworks and technologies such as Django, FastAPI, and WebSockets.
• A commitment to solving difficult technical problems and delivering measurable value to users.

About Otter.ai

We are in the business of shaping the future of work. Our mission is to make conversations more valuable.

With over 1B meetings transcribed, Otter.ai is the world’s leading tool for meeting transcription, summarization, and collaboration. Using artificial intelligence, Otter generates real‑time automated meeting notes, summaries, and other insights from in-person and virtual meetings - turning meetings into accessible, collaborative, and actionable data that can be shared across teams and organizations. The company is backed by early investors in Google, DeepMind, Zoom, and Tesla.

Otter.ai is an equal opportunity employer. We proudly celebrate diversity and are dedicated to inclusivity.

Salary range

Salary Range: $244,000 to $313,000 USD per year.

This salary range represents the low and high end of the estimated salary range for this position. The actual base salary offered for the role is dependent on several factors. Our base salary is just one component of a comprehensive total rewards package.
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