Senior Applied Scientist, Speech

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

Job summary

Otter.ai is seeking a Senior Applied Scientist to lead and scale AI for speech tasks. You will architect and optimize ASR/TTS systems, steer model training and deployment, and collaborate with product and infra teams to turn research into production features.

You will drive robust ML systems, evaluate data quality, and mentor engineers while shaping the cloud deployment workflow for scalable conversations and summaries.

Qualifications

• Hands-on experience building and fine-tuning speech or foundation models.

Responsibilities

• Architect, build, and evolve large-scale ASR and TTS systems.
• Lead training, fine-tuning, post-training, and inference strategies for speech models using PyTorch.
• Design and improve model architectures, loss functions, and training techniques for speech models.
• Own end-to-end ML system lifecycles from prototyping to production deployment and maintenance.
• Partner with product and infrastructure teams to translate research into production systems.
• Drive system-level improvements in model performance, robustness, and observability.
• Set technical direction for ML infrastructure, data pipelines, and deployment workflows in the cloud.
• Identify and resolve complex problems in model behavior and data quality.
• Mentor engineers and promote strong technical decision-making.

Skills

Speech models

ASR

TTS

Model optimization

Data preprocessing

Large-scale ML systems

Architectural decisions

Education

Bachelor’s or Master’s in CS

PhD preferred

Tools

PyTorch

Job description

The Opportunity

Do you want to lead projects to build and deploy cutting‑edge AI technology to help people get unparalleled value from meetings and conversations? Join our core AI team responsible for ML and work alongside industry‑veteran scientists and engineers. As a Senior Applied Scientist, you’ll bring your strong software engineering mindset to machine learning in order to scale and optimize our speech systems—creating and transforming innovative research into production‑ready features that power Otter’s summarization and conversational intelligence products.

Your Impact

• 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.

We're Looking for Someone Who

• 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.

About Otter.ai

We are in the business of shaping the future of work. Our mission is to make conversations more valuable.

With over 1B meetings transcribed, Otter.ai is the world’s leading tool for meeting transcription, summarization, and collaboration. Using artificial intelligence, Otter generates real‑time automated meeting notes, summaries, and other insights from in‑person and virtual meetings - turning meetings into accessible, collaborative, and actionable data that can be shared across teams and organizations. The company is backed by early investors in Google, DeepMind, Zoom, and Tesla.

Otter.ai is an equal opportunity employer. We proudly celebrate diversity and are dedicated to inclusivity.

*Otter.ai does not accept unsolicited resumes from 3rd party recruitment agencies without a written agreement in place for permanent placements. Any resume or other candidate information submitted outside of established candidate submission guidelines (including through our website or via email to any Otter.ai employee) and without a written agreement otherwise will be deemed to be our sole property, and no fee will be paid should we hire the candidate.

Salary range

Salary Range: $230,000 to $265,000 USD per year.

This salary range represents the low and high end of the estimated salary range for this position. The actual base salary offered for the role is dependent based on several factors. Our base salary is just one component of our comprehensive total rewards package.
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