Director of Research, Text-to-Speech

The role

The Director of Research will own the Text-to-Speech program end to end, including research strategy, technical bets, and models that ship. This hands-on leadership role involves shaping architectures, experiments, training strategy, and evaluation while building the research team.

What you will do

• Own the TTS research and model roadmap
• Drive advances across neural audio modeling, prosody, controllability, multilingual speech, and inference performance
• Review research, challenge assumptions, design experiments, and diagnose model failures
• Build evaluation and benchmarking using automated metrics and human perceptual assessment
• Lead individual contributors and tech lead managers
• Hire and develop researchers and technical leaders
• Partner with engineering and product leadership on ship-readiness
• Represent Deepgram's TTS research internally and externally

Required qualifications

• Deep expertise in modern TTS, speech generation, or audio generative modeling
• Track record of personally training and improving large-scale neural models
• Command of the modern speech-generation stack and open problems like naturalness, expressiveness, and inference cost
• History of setting research direction under genuine uncertainty
• Experience leading researchers and research engineers through other technical leaders
• AI as your default mode of work
• Ability to make complex technical tradeoffs legible to product, engineering, and executive audiences

Nice to have

• TTS or generative-audio models deployed at meaningful production scale
• Built or substantially scaled a high-performing AI research organization
• Sophisticated evaluation systems for generative speech
• Recognized external contributions such as publications, open source, patents, or invited talks

About the company

Deepgram is a research company that productizes as fast as possible. Their speech models and real-time infrastructure power AI systems for more than 5,000 organizations.