Research Scientist, Speech Technologies (Senior, Staff, Senior Staff)

Hippocratic AI; Menlo Park (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Hippocratic AI in Menlo Park, California, seeks a Research Scientist in Speech Technologies to lead the development of medically accurate, fast, and trustworthy ASR systems. The role focuses on building an ASR foundation for healthcare-grade conversational AI, with emphasis on accuracy for medical terminology and robust performance in clinical settings.

You will drive the architecture, data pipelines, and research publications, collaborating with a team of researchers and clinicians to deliver

Qualifications

• PhD or Masters with significant ASR research/industry experience.
• Strong programming skills in Python and C++.
• Experience designing and optimizing ASR models for streaming and non-streaming use cases.

Responsibilities

• Design and develop data-driven ASR models for streaming and non-streaming speech.
• Research and implement state-of-the-art architectures for medical domain.
• Train, evaluate, and optimize ASR models for accuracy, latency, and resources.
• Build data pipelines for large-scale medical speech datasets.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to integrate speech tech into Hippocratic AI platform.
• Publish research at tier-1 venues and contribute to research culture.

Skills

Python

C++

Linux/Unix

Communication

Team collaboration

ASR expertise

ML research

Data preprocessing

Education

PhD in Speech Recognition or related field

Masters with 5+ years in ASR

Tools

ESPNET

Kaldi

PyTorch

CUDA

Job description

Role Mission

As Research Scientist in Speech Technologies, you will lead the research and engineering that makes Hippocratic AI's conversational platform not just intelligent, but genuinely conversational—accurate, fast, and trustworthy in the highest-stakes environments imaginable. You'll define the ASR foundation for healthcare's most advanced conversational AI, ensuring every patient interaction is understood with clinical precision. This role exists because accurate speech recognition in clinical contexts is a frontier problem—no off-the-shelf solution exists, and the work directly determines whether our platform can reliably serve the millions of patients who need it.

Role Mission

As Research Scientist in Speech Technologies, you will lead the research and engineering that makes Hippocratic AI's conversational platform not just intelligent, but genuinely conversational—accurate, fast, and trustworthy in the highest-stakes environments imaginable. You'll define the ASR foundation for healthcare's most advanced conversational AI, ensuring every patient interaction is understood with clinical precision. This role exists because accurate speech recognition in clinical contexts is a frontier problem—no off-the-shelf solution exists, and the work directly determines whether our platform can reliably serve the millions of patients who need it.

What You Will Accomplish

Own your first major outcome: By day 90, you will have shipped measurable improvements to our production ASR system (improved accuracy on medical terminology, reduced latency, or expanded robustness to diverse patient populations), validated performance gains on clinically relevant benchmarks, and established the data infrastructure roadmap that will compound our advantage in medical speech recognition.

Drive lasting impact: At 12 months, you will have designed and deployed a next-generation ASR architecture purpose-built for healthcare, built the large-scale medical speech dataset pipeline that gives Hippocratic AI durable competitive advantage, published your research at tier-1 venues, and directly shaped how millions of patients experience conversational AI through your speech technology innovations.

The Team

You’ll lead a team of researchers and engineers building speech technologies that matter. You’ll work alongside ML researchers, software engineers, and clinicians from Google, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Stanford—as well as health system leaders who keep the work grounded in real clinical needs. This is a culture of rigorous research, rapid iteration, and solving genuinely hard technical problems that have real-world impact.

What You’ll Do

• Design and develop data-driven ASR models for both streaming and non-streaming conversational speech applications, architecting end-to-end speech recognition systems purpose-built for medical accuracy, latency, and robustness
• Research and implement state-of-the-art speech recognition architectures tailored to the medical domain, addressing problems that off-the-shelf ASR cannot solve—medical terminology, diverse patient populations, real-world acoustic conditions
• Train, evaluate, and optimize ASR models across accuracy, latency, and resource utilization—balancing clinical precision with production constraints to ensure seamless integration into our platform
• Build data infrastructure and curation pipelines for large-scale medical speech datasets, architecting the training foundations that create durable, compounding advantages in clinical speech recognition
• Collaborate with LLM, product, and clinical teams to integrate speech technologies into the broader Hippocratic AI platform, translating patient and clinician feedback into research priorities
• Contribute to research culture through rigorous experimentation, documentation, publications at tier-1 venues, and knowledge sharing that elevates the team's technical capabilities Location Requirement

We believe the best ideas happen together. This role is based in our Menlo Park, California office, expected to be five days a week. We're also exploring establishing a presence in the Bellevue area—if that develops, flexibility on location may be available for exceptional candidates.

What You Bring

Must‑Have:

• PhD with 3+ years of experience in Speech Recognition or related field or Masters with 5+ years of hands on experience with ASR.
• Experience Designing and developing algorithms for accurate and efficient speech recognition for both Streaming and Non-Streaming use cases.
• Experience with Training, evaluating, and optimizing ASR models for various factors including accuracy, latency, and resource utilization.
• Experience with Preprocessing and curating large speech datasets for training models.
• Strong programming skills with working knowledge of Python & C++
• Comfort working in a Linux/ Unix command-line environment.
• Team player with good communication skills (oral and written)

Nice‑to‑Have:

• Experience with building 0 to 1 ASR solutions, including setting up data pipelines, SOTA model architectures and evaluation pipelines.
• Hands‑on Experience with ESPNET, Kaldi and Pytorch.
• Experience with CUDA.
• Experience with leveraging LLMs for enhanced speech recognition tasks.
• Experience with Neural/ E2E Endpointer modeling.
• Publications in tier 1 journals in the field of speech recognition/ NLP.

Compensation

Compensation is based on experience, expertise, and level of responsibility. We offer competitive packages that reflect the seniority and scope of the role, along with equity, health insurance, and other benefits.

Why Join Hippocratic AI

Reinvent healthcare with AI that puts safety first.

Work with the people shaping the future. Hippocratic AI was co‑founded by CEO Munjal Shah and a team of physicians, hospital leaders, AI pioneers, and researchers from institutions like El Camino Health, Johns Hopkins, Washington University in St. Louis, Stanford, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and NVIDIA.

Backed by the world’s leading healthcare and AI investors. We recently raised a $126M Series C at a $3.5B valuation, led by Avenir Growth, bringing total funding to $404M with participation from CapitalG, General Catalyst, a16z, Kleiner Perkins, Premji Invest, UHS, Cincinnati Children’s, WellSpan Health, John Doerr, Rick Klausner, and others.

Build alongside the best in healthcare and AI. Join experts who’ve spent their careers improving care, advancing science, and building world‑changing technologies — ensuring our platform is powerful, trusted, and truly transformative.

Equal Opportunity

Hippocratic AI is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, age, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, genetic information, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. We are committed to building a team that reflects the patients we serve. We actively encourage applications from candidates of all backgrounds. If you require accommodations during the hiring process, please contact [e-mail].

Please be aware of recruitment scams impersonating Hippocratic AI. All recruiting communication will come from @hippocraticai.com email addresses. We will never request payment or sensitive personal information during the hiring process.