Director of AI Research

Otter.ai • Mountain View, CA

3d • Hybrid

About The Position

The Director of AI Research leads research and development across automatic speech recognition (ASR), speaker identification (SID), large language models (LLMs), and audio language models. This hands-on leadership role shapes AI capabilities, product direction, and long-term research strategy, while setting technical priorities and guiding model and infrastructure decisions. The Director works directly with the team on challenging research and engineering problems and partners with Product, Engineering, and Data to turn research advances into reliable product capabilities. The role also builds the team, experimentation practices, and technical foundation needed to move quickly while maintaining high standards for quality and performance.

Requirements

• Master’s degree or higher in Computer Science or a related technical field.
• At least 10 years of software engineering or AI research and development experience, including at least 4 years managing technical teams.
• Track record of leading AI research with meaningful scientific and product impact, supported by publications and deployed systems.
• Deep expertise in speech technologies and LLMs, with 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.
• Ability to set technical direction, develop teams, and collaborate across Research, Product, Engineering, and Data.
• Sound judgment in balancing research ambition, execution speed, and product quality.
• Commitment to solving difficult technical problems and delivering measurable value to users.

Nice To Haves

• PhD in Computer Science or a related technical field.
• Familiarity with application frameworks and technologies such as Django, FastAPI, and WebSockets.

Responsibilities

• Define and execute a research roadmap across speech recognition, speaker identification, LLMs, and audio language models, connecting technical advances to user needs and business priorities.
• Guide the model lifecycle, including data preparation, model architecture, pre-training, post-training, evaluation, and deployment.
• Establish rigorous methods for measuring quality and improving models using large-scale training data.
• Hire, mentor, and develop a high-performing AI research team, fostering scientific rigor, open collaboration, and clear accountability.
• Drive improvements in model accuracy, latency, reliability, and cost through large-scale training, inference optimization, and efficient compute use.
• Evaluate emerging methods, reproduce promising results, and adapt research advances to practical product challenges.
• Partner with Engineering and Data teams to strengthen infrastructure, tooling, and workflows for rapid experimentation and reliable deployment.
• Explore AI capabilities that expand product offerings and support the company’s long-term vision.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director