Principal Research & Engineering, Realtime Voice AI

The role

This person will define and build the realtime Voice AI stack across speech models, streaming systems, voice-agent runtime, and evaluation. They will lead research and engineering efforts to deliver responsive and trustworthy voice agents for enterprise settings.

What you will do

• Establish the technical roadmap for the realtime Voice AI stack.
• Utilize a 1,000 GPU cluster for performance benchmarking and 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, and production readiness.
• Collaborate with infrastructure, product, design, and agentic AI teams.
• Develop evaluation systems measuring voice quality through various metrics.
• Refine production voice behavior by debugging across multiple layers.
• Mentor and coach a team specializing in speech research, audio infrastructure, realtime systems, and evaluation.

Required 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.
• 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

Benefits

• 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

About the company

Inflection AI is a Public Benefit Corporation empowering people with human-centered, emotionally intelligent AI. The company created Pi, a personal AI agent powered by Inflection AI's foundation model.