Director of AI Research

The role

You will lead research and development across automatic speech recognition, speaker identification, large language models, and audio language models. You will set technical priorities, guide model and infrastructure decisions, and build the AI research team.

What you will do

• Define and execute a research roadmap across speech recognition, speaker identification, LLMs, and audio language models.
• Guide data preparation, model architecture, pre-training, post-training, evaluation, and deployment.
• Hire, mentor, and grow a high-performing AI research team.
• Drive improvements in model accuracy, latency, reliability, and cost through large-scale training and inference optimization.
• Evaluate emerging methods and adapt advances from literature to practical product challenges.
• Partner with Engineering and Data teams to strengthen infrastructure, tooling, and workflows.
• Explore AI capabilities that expand product capabilities and support long-term vision.

Required qualifications

• Master’s degree or higher in Computer Science or a related technical field
• 10+ years of software engineering or AI research and development experience
• 4+ years of experience managing technical teams
• Track record of leading AI research with scientific and product impact, supported by publications and deployed systems
• Deep expertise in speech technologies and LLMs
• Hands-on experience in transformer architectures, reinforcement learning, and multimodal model training
• Experience designing, training, evaluating, and optimizing large-scale ML systems, including distributed training and inference in GPU environments
• Strong proficiency in Python and PyTorch
• Experience using Kubernetes and related infrastructure to run ML workloads at scale
• Demonstrated ability to set technical direction, develop teams, and collaborate across Research, Product, Engineering, and Data
• Familiarity with application frameworks and technologies such as Django, FastAPI, and WebSockets

Nice to have

• PhD

About the company

Otter.ai is a tool for meeting transcription, summarization, and collaboration. The company is backed by early investors in Google, DeepMind, Zoom, and Tesla.