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Senior Applied Scientist, Speech

Otter.ai· Engineering
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Mountain View, CA$230k - $265kfull-timePosted 2mo ago

About the role

Senior Applied Scientist responsible for architecting and deploying large-scale speech systems (ASR/TTS) and transforming research into production features for Otter’s summarization and conversational intelligence products.

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 with 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 research and production constraints.
  • Own end-to-end ML system lifecycles from research prototyping through production deployment, monitoring, iteration, and long-term maintenance.
  • Partner with product and infrastructure teams to translate research into scalable, production-grade systems with 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 problems in model behavior, data quality, scaling, and system interactions, often before surface issues appear.
  • Mentor and elevate other engineers, influencing team standards and contributing to a culture of strong technical decision-making and execution.

Qualifications

  • Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science or related field with 5+ years of relevant industry experience; PhD preferred.
  • Deep, hands-on experience building and fine-tuning speech or foundation models, with production experience in ASR and/or TTS systems.
  • Strong command of modern ML research with ability to evaluate new papers and drive production-worthy innovations.
  • Experience deploying, scaling, monitoring, and operating ML systems in production across training, inference, and serving infrastructure.
  • Comfort with large-scale speech and conversational datasets, including data preprocessing, augmentation, quality analysis, and labeling strategies for model training and evaluation.
  • Ability to lead technical projects independently, driving clarity in ambiguous problem spaces and making sound architectural decisions.
  • Experience or strong interest in agentic systems, tool-use frameworks, or multi-model orchestration.

Skills

Required:PyTorchASRTTS

Benefits

  • Equal opportunity employer
  • Diversity and inclusivity commitment
Last updated Aug 19, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About Otter.ai

Turn conversations into transcripts

Otter is the AI Notetaker that builds your knowledge base and powers your workflow with transcription, automated summaries, AI Chat, and more.

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