Director, Text-to-Speech Synthesis Research
About the role
Director of Research to own the Text-to-Speech program end to end, including research strategy, technical bets, and production-ready models. Hands-on leadership role shaping architectures, experiments, training strategy, evaluation, and building a high-performing team.
Responsibilities
- Own the TTS research and model roadmap — decide which technical directions can materially move speech-generation quality, including the expensive and non-obvious ones, and recognize when an approach should change or die.
- Drive advances across neural audio modeling, prosody and expressiveness, controllability, multilingual speech, voice identity and consistency, data and training strategy, post-training, and inference performance — and make sure they land as measurable production gains.
- Stay deeply technical: review research, challenge assumptions, design experiments, diagnose model failures, and take on the highest-leverage problems yourself.
- Build evaluation and benchmarking that explains why models improve, not just whether they did — automated metrics alongside human perceptual assessment.
- Lead a mix of individual contributors and tech lead managers. Hire and develop both, hold an exceptionally high technical bar, grow senior researchers into technical leaders, and set direction across sub-teams while pushing decisions down to the people closest to the work.
- Partner with engineering and product leadership on ship-readiness, and represent Deepgram's TTS research internally and externally.
Qualifications
- Deep expertise in modern TTS, speech generation, or audio generative modeling, with a track record of personally training and improving large-scale neural models.
- Command of the modern speech-generation stack and the open problems behind naturalness, expressiveness, controllability, robustness, voice consistency, and inference cost.
- A history of setting research direction under genuine uncertainty: prioritizing experiments, allocating compute and researcher time, and killing approaches that aren't working.
- Experience leading researchers and research engineers through other technical leaders — developing tech lead managers or equivalent, setting direction across sub-teams — while staying technically influential yourself.
- AI as your default mode of work, not an occasional tool. You've rebuilt how you and your team operate around it, and you have a specific, earned view of what it still can't do in speech research.
- The ability to make complex technical tradeoffs legible to product, engineering, and executive audiences.
Skills
About Deepgram
Building foundational AI for speech transcription and understanding.
Deepgram is a foundational AI company on a mission to understand human language. We give any developer access to the most advanced speech AI transcription and understanding with just an API call. Our models deliver the fastest, most accurate transcription alongside contextual features like summarization, sentiment analysis, and topic detection. Beyond that, developers can: 🔊 Process live-streaming or pre-recorded audio 🌎 Transcribe in dozens of languages ⚙️ Train custom models for unique use cases 🔑 Access deep NLU with a unified API 💻 Build in any programming language with our SDKs ✅ Deploy on-prem or on DG’s managed cloud 📈 Get scalable GPU infra for training and inference Deepgram is a proud NVIDIA partner and Y Combinator company, and we recently completed a $72M Series B to define the future of AI Speech Understanding, making us the most-funded speech AI company at its stage.
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