Director of TTS Research & Production Systems

Apply; Michigan; On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Deepgram in the United States is seeking a Director of Research to own the Text-to-Speech program end to end. This hands-on leadership role sets direction, designs architectures, and guides experiments while building a high-impact research team.

You will advance state-of-the-art speech generation, translate breakthroughs into production models, and partner with engineering and product leadership to ensure ship-readiness and measurable improvements.

Qualifications

• Deep expertise in modern TTS, speech generation, or audio generative modeling; proven track record of training and improving large-scale neural models.
• Knowledge of speech-generation stack and open problems: naturalness, expressiveness, controllability, robustness, voice consistency, and inference cost.
• Experience setting research direction under uncertainty: prioritizing experiments, allocating compute/research time, discontinuing unproductive approaches.
• Experience leading researchers and engineers through other technical leaders, building tech-lead managers or equivalents.
• AI-first mindset in daily work; strong view of current limitations in speech research.
• Ability to articulate complex technical tradeoffs to product, engineering, and execs.

Responsibilities

• Own the TTS research and model roadmap, deciding technical directions to move speech-generation quality.
• Drive advances across neural audio modeling, prosody, expressiveness, multilingual speech, voice identity, data and training strategy.
• Stay deeply technical: review research, design experiments, diagnose model failures, and tackle high-leverage problems.
• Build evaluation systems with automated metrics and human perceptual assessment to explain improvements.
• Lead a mix of individual contributors and tech leads, hiring and developing leaders while maintaining high technical standards.
• Partner with engineering and product leadership on ship-readiness and represent Deepgram's TTS research internally and externally.

Skills

TTS research

Speech generation

Neural modeling

Leadership

Experiment design

Technical mentorship

Tools

Deep learning frameworks

Job description

Deepgram in the United States is seeking a Director of Research to own the Text-to-Speech program end to end. This hands-on leadership role sets direction, designs architectures, and guides experiments while building a high-impact research team.

You will advance state-of-the-art speech generation, translate breakthroughs into production models, and partner with engineering and product leadership to ensure ship-readiness and measurable improvements.