Lead Real-Time Voice AI Architect

Inflection AI, Inc.; Palo Alto, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 400,000 - 550,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Robust medical, dental and vision with

401k matching

Flexible Time Off

Paid holidays and sick leave

Parental, Medical and Family careleave

Stipends for cell-phone, wellness and设

Job summary

Inflection AI in Palo Alto seeks a hands-on technical leader to define and build the realtime Voice AI stack across speech models, streaming systems, voice-agent runtime, and evaluation. You will partner with research, engineering, product, and design to deliver voice agents that feel responsive, trustworthy, and useful in enterprise settings.

This role demands guiding architecture, mentoring a team of speech researchers and engineers, and making build-vs-buy decisions while focusing on latency,

Qualifications

• Experience leading principal Research and Engineering contributions to realtime voice, speech, audio AI, or conversational AI systems in production.
• Strong product intuition for natural, trustworthy, emotionally appropriate voice interactions.
• Ability to lead senior technical talent while staying close to code, architecture, and debugging work.

Responsibilities

• Establish the technical roadmap for Inflection's realtime Voice AI stack, including streaming ASR, TTS, speech-to-speech, speech LLMs, turn-taking, barge-in, latency, and reliability.
• Utilize a 1,000 GPU cluster to support performance benchmarking and extensive experimentation.
• Determine build-vs-buy-vs-train strategies for core audio, speech, and realtime interaction components.
• Direct research and engineering efforts focused on speech quality, naturalness, expressiveness, emotional fit, controllability, and production readiness.
• Collaborate with infrastructure, product, design, and agentic AI teams to deploy voice agents for enterprise workflows.
• Develop evaluation systems measuring voice quality through metrics such as clarity, emotional appropriateness, interruption handling, task success, user preference, latency, and reliability, moving beyond standard WER.
• Refine production voice behavior by debugging across runtime, model, evaluation, data, and product layers.
• Mentor, and Coach a team specializing in speech research, audio infrastructure, realtime systems, and evaluation.

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent

Job description

Inflection AI in Palo Alto seeks a hands-on technical leader to define and build the realtime Voice AI stack across speech models, streaming systems, voice-agent runtime, and evaluation. You will partner with research, engineering, product, and design to deliver voice agents that feel responsive, trustworthy, and useful in enterprise settings.

This role demands guiding architecture, mentoring a team of speech researchers and engineers, and making build-vs-buy decisions while focusing on latency,