AI Engineer - ASR: PraDigi, a Pratham Initiative

The role

You will lead the development and deployment of speech recognition systems for automated reading assessment across multiple languages. This involves managing the full ASR pipeline from data collection and annotation to model training and deployment.

What you will do

• Provide technical inputs to speech data collection design
• Define annotation guidelines and quality checks
• Work with data and field teams to identify data gaps
• Design annotation schemas and inter-annotator quality processes
• Train, fine-tune, and evaluate ASR models for children's read speech
• Build pipelines for audio preprocessing, segmentation, and training
• Adapt existing ASR architectures for reading assessment
• Optimize models for practical deployment environments
• Develop approaches for detecting reading errors like substitutions and omissions
• Define and track ASR metrics and build evaluation pipelines

Required qualifications

• A Degree in any Mathematics/Computer Science/Data Science or related STEM field
• 3-5 years of full-time experience
• At least 2 years in an AI/ML role
• Strong experience in automatic speech recognition, speech processing, or spoken-language technologies
• Strong Python skills
• Experience with PyTorch or similar deep-learning frameworks
• Experience working with modern ASR architectures and toolkits such as Hugging Face Transformers, NeMo, Kaldi, or equivalent
• Understanding of acoustic modelling
• Understanding of CTC / transducer / encoder-decoder architectures
• Understanding of decoding and beam search
• Understanding of language models
• Understanding of forced alignment, phoneme representations, and WER/CER

Nice to have

• Experience preparing and working with large-scale audio and transcription datasets
• Ability to diagnose model errors systematically

Benefits

• Competitive Remuneration benchmarked against industry standards
• Flexible, remote-first work environment
• Opportunity to travel to field locations

Before you apply

• Shortlisted candidates will be contacted for further rounds
• Please refer to Guidance on Candidates AI Usage by Anthropic

About the company

Pratham International is a US 501(c)(3) that supports learning innovations for children and youth globally. Through the PraDigi Innovation Centre, it creates technology innovations in Generative AI, ASR, and NLP for low-resource communities.