Director, TTS Research & Production

Apply; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Deepgram is seeking a Director of Research to own our Text-to-Speech program end to end — the research strategy, 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, driving production-ready advances in speech generation.

Qualifications

• Deep expertise in modern TTS, speech generation, or audio generative modeling.
• Ability to set research direction under uncertainty and prioritize experiments.
• Experience leading researchers and research engineers and developing tech leads.
• A track record of producing production-ready AI research results.

Responsibilities

• Own the TTS research and model roadmap, deciding directions and evaluating approaches.
• Drive advances across neural audio modeling, prosody, expressiveness, and multilingual speech.
• Review research, design experiments, diagnose failures, and tackle high-leverage problems.
• Build evaluation systems showing why models improve with automated metrics and human assessment.
• Lead a mix of ICs and tech leads, hire and develop leaders, and push decisions to the team.
• Partner with engineering and product leadership on ship-readiness and external representation.

Skills

TTS / speech generation

Neural models

Research direction

Leadership

AI-first work

Cross-team communication

Job description

Deepgram is seeking a Director of Research to own our Text-to-Speech program end to end — the research strategy, 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, driving production-ready advances in speech generation.