Research Engineer - Voice Intelligence

Pocket Worlds; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 230,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Direct impact on day-to-day operations

High-trust, high-responsibility

Learn fast

Job summary

Pocket Worlds is seeking a research-minded engineer to advance our voice stack from capture and understanding to real-time experiences and evaluation. You will own improvements to diarization, VAD, noise robustness, transcription quality, and speaker ID, and you will help build memory, summaries, and action extraction features that feel immediately valuable.

You’ll run tight research loops, define metrics and eval sets, and productionize what works, while collaborating with product and design to

Qualifications

• 6–10+ years of experience shipping production systems.
• Strong in applied ML/research engineering and turning prototypes into robust product.
• Understand audio/voice fundamentals (signal processing basics helpful).
• Care deeply about performance and reliability.

Responsibilities

• Invent and ship improvements to voice stack: diarization, VAD, noise robustness, transcription quality, speaker ID, and post-processing.
• Build new voice-powered product capabilities: better memory, better meeting/voice summaries, better action extraction, better personalization.
• Run tight research loops: define metrics, build eval sets, iterate on models/algorithms, and productionize what works.
• Improve real-time performance and reliability: streaming pipelines, latency budgets, fallbacks, and graceful degradation.
• Partner closely with product + design to translate voice capabilities into features people feel immediately.

Skills

Production systems ownership

Applied ML / research engineering

Audio fundamentals

Performance & reliability

Job description

About the role

Pocket is building a category-defining platform for ambient intelligence. Voice is the highest-signal interface we have — and we’re looking for a research-minded engineer to push what’s possible with voice end-to-end: capture → understanding → real-time experiences → evaluation.

What you'll own

• Invent and ship improvements to our voice stack: diarization, VAD, noise robustness, transcription quality, speaker ID, and post-processing.
• Build new voice-powered product capabilities: better memory, better meeting/voice summaries, better action extraction, better personalization.
• Run tight research loops: define metrics, build eval sets, iterate on models/algorithms, and productionize what works.
• Improve real-time performance and reliability: streaming pipelines, latency budgets, fallbacks, and graceful degradation.
• Partner closely with product + design to translate voice capabilities into features people feel immediately.

What success looks like

• Step-function improvements in voice quality and perceived intelligence (measured and felt).
• A clear evaluation harness (offline + online) that prevents regressions and accelerates iteration.
• Voice features that ship reliably at scale with predictable latency.

What we're looking for

• Have 6–10+ years of experience shipping production systems with strong technical ownership.
• Are strong in applied ML/research engineering and can turn prototypes into robust product.
• Understand audio/voice fundamentals (signal processing basics helpful) and modern model/eval workflows.
• Care deeply about performance and reliability.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience with streaming audio pipelines and real-time systems.
• Experience with LLM post-processing, structured extraction, and evaluation.
• Experience building tooling for labeling, dataset curation, and QA.

What we offer

• Work directly with us and learn fast
• Direct impact on how the company operates day to day
• High-trust, high-responsibility environment
• Competitive compensation

About Pocket

Pocket is a Y Combinator W26 company building a premium hardware plus software product in the AI voice recorder space. We are obsessed with quality and speed. We are scaling very fast in the US and now European markets and building a device experience that can become the category leader.