Senior Applied Scientist - Scalable Speech AI

Otter.ai; Mountain View (CA); On-site; USD 230,000 - 265,000; Full time

Job summary

Otter.ai is hiring a Senior Applied Scientist to lead projects that scale cutting-edge AI for meetings and conversations. You will advance ASR and TTS, deploy production-grade speech systems, and transform research into features powering Otter’s summaries and conversational intelligence.

You’ll work with industry veterans to optimize models, reduce latency, and improve reliability while mentoring engineers and shaping ML infrastructure in a cloud environment.

Qualifications

• Holds a Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science or a related field with 5+ years of relevant industry experience; PhD is preferred.
• Has deep, hands-on experience building and fine-tuning speech or foundation models, with production experience in ASR and/or TTS systems.
• Demonstrates strong command of modern ML research, with the ability to critically evaluate new papers and drive innovation by identifying what is production-worthy versus experimental.
• Has experience deploying, scaling, monitoring, and operating ML systems in production across training, inference, and serving infrastructure.
• Is comfortable working with large-scale speech and conversational datasets, including data preprocessing, augmentation, quality analysis, and labeling strategies to support model training and evaluation.
• Can lead technical projects independently, driving clarity in ambiguous problem spaces and making sound architectural decisions.
• Has experience with or strong interest in agentic systems, tool-use frameworks, or multi-model orchestration.

Responsibilities

• Architect, build, and evolve large-scale ASR and TTS systems that power mission-critical product experiences including speech understanding across millions of conversations.
• Lead the design and implementation of training, fine-tuning, post-training, and inference strategies for speech models using PyTorch making principled trade-offs across quality, latency, cost, and reliability.
• Design and improve model architectures, loss functions, decoding strategies, and training techniques for speech models, informed by both research and production constraints.
• Own end-to-end ML system lifecycles, from research prototyping through production deployment, monitoring, iteration, and long-term maintenance.
• Partner deeply with product, and infrastructure teams to develop and translate cutting-edge research into scalable, production-grade systems that deliver measurable user and business impact.
• Drive system-level improvements in model performance, robustness, observability, and operational excellence using real-world conversational data at scale.
• Set technical direction and best practices for ML infrastructure, data pipelines, evaluation frameworks, and deployment workflows in a cloud environment.
• Identify and resolve complex, ambiguous problems in model behavior, data quality, scaling, and system interactions, often before they surface as user-visible issues.
• Mentor and elevate other engineers, influencing team standards, reviewing designs, and contributing to a culture of strong technical decision-making and execution.

Skills

Speech models

PyTorch

Production deployment

Leadership

Education

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science

PhD preferred

Job description

Otter.ai is hiring a Senior Applied Scientist to lead projects that scale cutting-edge AI for meetings and conversations. You will advance ASR and TTS, deploy production-grade speech systems, and transform research into features powering Otter’s summaries and conversational intelligence.

You’ll work with industry veterans to optimize models, reduce latency, and improve reliability while mentoring engineers and shaping ML infrastructure in a cloud environment.