Director of AI Research
About The Position
Otter.ai is seeking a Director of AI Research to lead 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 the company’s AI capabilities, product direction, and long-term research strategy. The director will set technical priorities, guide model and infrastructure decisions, and work directly with the team on research and engineering problems. Working closely with Product, Engineering, and Data teams, the director will translate research advances into reliable product capabilities and build the team, experimentation practices, and technical foundation needed for rapid progress and high standards of quality and performance. Otter.ai makes AI tools for meeting transcription, summarization, and collaboration, with a mission to make conversations more valuable.
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, with 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, aligning technical advances with 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 grow a high-performing AI research team; foster scientific rigor, open collaboration, accountability, evidence-based viewpoints, and shared decision-making.
- Improve model accuracy, latency, reliability, and cost through large-scale training, inference optimization, and efficient use of compute.
- 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 can expand product functionality and support the company’s long-term vision.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Director
