Director of Research, Text to Speech
Deepgram · Remote · USA - Remote · San Francisco, CA · Ann Arbor, Michigan ·
COMPENSATION
$263k – $328k
Listed on the employer's job board (Ashby)
- Director level role
- Fully remote
- Text-to-Speech focus
- AI-first culture
- Leadership + hands-on
You will own the end-to-end Text-to-Speech research roadmap, from technical bets to model deployment. This role combines strategic leadership with deep technical involvement, requiring you to shape architectures, design experiments, and build a high-performing research team. You will partner with engineering and product leaders to ensure research advances translate into measurable production gains.
What you'll do
- Define TTS research roadmap and decide on technical directions for speech generation quality
- Drive advances in neural audio modeling, prosody, multilingual speech, and inference performance
- Design experiments, review research, and diagnose model failures personally
- Build evaluation systems combining automated metrics with human perceptual assessment
- Hire and develop researchers and tech lead managers while maintaining high technical standards
- Partner with engineering and product leadership on ship-readiness and represent research externally
What you'll need
- Deep expertise in modern TTS, speech generation, or audio generative modeling
- Track record of personally training and improving large-scale neural models
- Experience setting research direction under uncertainty and allocating compute resources
- History of leading researchers and tech lead managers while staying technically influential
- Proficiency in using AI tools as a default mode of work and integrating them into workflows
- Ability to communicate complex technical tradeoffs to product, engineering, and executive audiences
Nice to have
- Experience deploying TTS or generative-audio models at meaningful production scale
- Background in building or scaling high-performing AI research organizations
- Expertise in sophisticated evaluation systems for generative speech or voice cloning
- Recognized external contributions such as publications, open source, or patents in speech synthesis
- Experience in fast-moving startup environments taking models from idea to production
Stack
- Text-to-Speech
- Neural Audio Modeling
- Speech Generation
- AI Tools
How you'll work
- Fully remote position
- Fast-paced AI environment requiring constant adaptation
- Non-traditional hours, not a prescriptive 9-to-5 role