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Principal Research & Engineering, Realtime Voice AI

Inflection AI· Engineering
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Palo Alto, CA$400k - $550k + equityFull-timePosted 3mo ago

About the role

Hands-on technical leadership role to define and build Inflection’s realtime Voice AI stack (speech models, streaming systems, voice-agent runtime, evaluation) and shape how emotionally intelligent AI speaks in enterprise voice interactions.

Responsibilities

  • Establish the technical roadmap for Inflection's realtime Voice AI stack, encompassing streaming ASR, TTS, speech-to-speech, speech LLMs, turn-taking, barge-in, latency, and reliability.
  • Utilize a 1,000 GPU cluster to support performance benchmarking and extensive experimentation.
  • Determine build-vs-buy-vs-train strategies for core audio, speech, and realtime interaction components.
  • Direct research and engineering efforts focused on speech quality, naturalness, expressiveness, emotional fit, controllability, and production readiness.
  • Collaborate with infrastructure, product, design, and agentic AI teams to deploy voice agents for enterprise workflows.
  • Develop evaluation systems measuring voice quality through metrics such as clarity, emotional appropriateness, interruption handling, task success, user preference, latency, and reliability, moving beyond standard WER.
  • Refine production voice behavior by debugging across runtime, model, evaluation, data, and product layers.
  • Mentor, and Coach a team specializing in speech research, audio infrastructure, realtime systems, and evaluation.

Qualifications

  • Experience leading or serving as a principal Research and Engineering contributor to realtime voice, speech, audio AI, or conversational AI systems in production.
  • Experience with one or more of: streaming ASR, TTS, speech-to-speech systems, speech LLMs, audio tokenization, multimodal models, barge-in, low-latency inference, or realtime agents.
  • Strong technical judgment across both speech modeling and production systems.
  • Ability to define voice quality in terms of user and customer outcomes, not only offline model metrics.
  • Experience designing or using evaluation systems that capture real user experience.
  • Strong product intuition for natural, trustworthy, emotionally appropriate voice interactions.
  • Ability to lead senior technical talent while staying close to the code, architecture, and debugging work.
  • Bachelor’s degree or equivalent in a related field to the offered position requirements

Benefits

  • Robust medical, dental and vision options with employer contributions for HSA, FSA and DFSA
  • 401k matching program
  • Flexible Time Off, 10 paid holidays, 5 days sick leave
  • Parental, Medical and Family care leave
  • Generous cell-phone, wellness and office set up stipends
  • Support of country-specific visa needs for international employees living in the Bay Area
Last updated Jul 8, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About Inflection AI

Pi, your personal AI

Inflection AI is pioneering the future with human-centered, emotionally intelligent AI that transforms interactions from transactional to reltational, creating enduring value for individuals and enterprises alike.

AIemotional intelligencehuman-centered interactionliquid-ai-recruiting-target
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