Director, Text-to-Speech Synthesis Research

Deepgram; United States; À distance; USD 180 000 - 240 000; Plein temps

Résumé du poste

Deepgram is seeking a Director of Research to own the Text-to-Speech program end to end, shaping the research strategy, technical bets, and production-ready models. This is a hands-on leadership role where you set direction and stay in the details, building architectures, experiments, and evaluation frameworks.

You will recruit and mentor exceptional researchers, define the team operating model, and drive state-of-the-art speech generation into production, partnering with product and engineering

Responsabilités

• Own the TTS research and model roadmap, decide which technical directions can materially move speech-generation quality.

Description du poste

Company Overview

Deepgram is the leading platform underpinning the emerging trillion-dollar Voice AI economy, providing real-time APIs for speech-to-text (STT), text-to-speech (TTS), and building production-grade voice agents at scale. More than 200,000 developers and 1,300+ organizations build voice offerings that are ‘Powered by Deepgram’, including Twilio, Cloudflare, Sierra, Decagon, Vapi, Daily, Cresta, Granola, and Jack in the Box. Deepgram’s voice-native foundation models are accessed through cloud APIs or as self-hosted and on-premises software, with unmatched accuracy, low latency, and cost efficiency. Backed by a recent Series C led by leading global investors and strategic partners, Deepgram has processed over 50,000 years of audio and transcribed more than 1 trillion words. There is no organization in the world that understands voice better than Deepgram.

Company Operating Rhythm

At Deepgram, we expect an AI-first mindset AI use and comfort aren’t optional, they’re core to how we operate, innovate, and measure performance. Every team member who works at Deepgram is expected to actively use and experiment with advanced AI tools, and even build your own into your everyday work. We measure how effectively AI is applied to deliver results, and consistent, creative use of the latest AI capabilities is key to success here. Candidates should be comfortable adopting new models and modes quickly, integrating AI into their workflows, and continuously pushing the boundaries of what these technologies can do. Additionally, we move at the pace of AI. Change is rapid, and you can expect your day-to-day work to evolve just as quickly. This may not be the right role if you’re not excited to experiment, adapt, think on your feet, and learn constantly, or if you’re seeking something highly prescriptive with a traditional 9-to-5.

The Opportunity

We're looking for a Director of Research to own our Text-to-Speech program end to end the research strategy, the technical bets, and the models that ship. This is a hands-on leadership role: you set direction and stay in the details, shaping architectures, experiments, training strategy, and evaluation. You'll also build the team and operating model that let exceptional researchers move fast without lowering the bar. The mandate is broad: advance the state of the art in speech generation, and turn those advances into models in production.

What You'll Do

Own the TTS research and model roadmap decide which technical directions can materially move speech-generation quality, including the expensive and non-obvious ones, and recognize when an approach should change or die. Drive advances across neural audio modeling, prosody and expressiveness, controllability, multilingual speech, voice identity and consistency, data and training strategy, post-training, and inference performance and make sure they land as measurable production gains. Stay deeply technical: review research, challenge assumptions, design experiments, diagn