Research Staff, Voice AI Foundations

Overview

COMPANY OVERVIEW Deepgram is the leading platform underpinning the emerging trillion-dollar Voice AI economy, providing real-time APIs for speech-to-text (STT), text-to-speech (TTS), and building production-grade voice agents at scale. More than 200,000 developers and 1,300+ organizations build voice offerings that are ‘Powered by Deepgram’, including Twilio, Cloudflare, Sierra, Decagon, Vapi, Daily, Cresta, Granola,

What you'll do

• Your research will focus on solving one or more of the following problems:
• Build next-generation neural audio codecs that achieve extreme, low bit-rate compression and high fidelity reconstruction across a world-scale corpus of general audio.
• Pioneer steerable generative models that can synthesize the full diversity of human speech from the codec latent representation, from casual conversation to highly emotional expression to complex multi-speaker scenarios with environmental noise and overlapping speech.
• Develop embedding systems that cleanly factorize the codec latent space into interpretable dimensions of speaker, content, style, environment, and channel effects, enabling precise control over each aspect and the ability to massively amplify an existing seed dataset through “latent recombination”.
• Leverage latent recombination to generate synthetic audio data at previously impossible scales, unlocking joint model and data scaling paradigms for audio.
• Endeavor to train multimodal speech-to-speech systems that can 1) understand any human irrespective of their demographics, state, or environment and 2) produce empathic, human-like responses that achieve conversational or task-oriented objectives.
• Design model architectures, training schemes, and inference algorithms that are adapted for hardware at the bare metal enabling cost efficient training on billion-hour datasets and powering real-time inference for hundreds of millions of concurrent conversations.
• THE CHALLENGE We are seeking researchers who:

Requirements

• Every team member who works at Deepgram is expected to actively use and experiment with advanced AI tools, and even build your own into your everyday work.
• We measure how effectively AI is applied to deliver results, and consistent, creative use of the latest AI capabilities is key to success here.
• Candidates should be comfortable adopting new models and modes quickly, integrating AI into their workflows, and continuously pushing the boundaries of what these technologies can do.
• Additionally, we move at the pace of AI.
• Change is rapid, and you can expect your day-to-day work to evolve just as quickly.
• This may not be the right role if you’re not excited to experiment, adapt, think on your feet, and learn constantly, or if you’re seeking something highly prescriptive with a traditional 9-to-5.
• THE OPPORTUNITY Voice is the most natural modality for human interaction with machines.
• However, current sequence modeling paradigms based on jointly scaling model and data cannot deliver voice AI capable of universal human interaction.

Skills