Research Scientist, Speech & Audio

The role

You will define how Innodata designs, structures, and evaluates audio data for speech and audio models. You will partner with customers and frontier labs to translate model requirements into data specifications and build evaluation methodologies.

What you will do

• Translate speech and audio model requirements into concrete data specifications
• Build evaluation methodology beyond word error rate
• Decide how audio should be structured, enriched, and sampled
• Partner with the transcription and linguistics lead to turn model objectives into transcription specifications
• Partner with the audio solutions and engineering team to scope programs and capture audio to spec
• Run experiments to prove data decisions matter
• Design adversarial and stumping evaluations
• Publish benchmarks, methodology, and papers
• Work with annotation teams, subject-matter experts, and the synthetic- and augmented-audio pipeline

Required qualifications

• Roughly 5+ years of hands-on industry experience in speech or audio ML
• Bachelor's degree in computer science, electrical engineering, or a related technical or quantitative field
• Trained and evaluated speech or audio models yourself
• Strong PyTorch fundamentals
• Fluency in the toolchains and metrics speech work runs on: ESPnet, NeMo, SpeechBrain, or Kaldi, HuggingFace, forced alignment, and WER/CER
• Hands-on experience with multilingual, accented, dialectal, low-resource, or code-switched speech, and with synthetic or augmented audio
• A track record of first-author publications or strong open-source contributions at venues such as Interspeech, ICASSP, ASRU, SLT, or NeurIPS
• Ability to work directly with research scientists at customers and frontier labs
• Ability to explain data and modeling decisions clearly to expert and non-expert audiences

Nice to have

• Advanced degree (MS or PhD) in a relevant field
• Interest or hands-on experience in responsible-AI evaluation and red-teaming

About the company

Innodata is a global data engineering company. Their mission is to enable the responsible advancement of artificial intelligence by providing data, evaluation frameworks, and human expertise.