Director of Research, Text to Speech
About The Position
Deepgram is seeking a Director of Research to lead its Text-to-Speech (TTS) program. This is a hands-on leadership role responsible for the research strategy, technical direction, and model development for TTS. The role involves setting direction, staying involved in technical details, shaping architectures, experiments, training strategy, and evaluation. The Director will also build the team and operating model to enable researchers to move quickly while maintaining high standards. The primary goal is to advance the state of the art in speech generation and deploy these advancements into production models.
Requirements
- Deep expertise in modern TTS, speech generation, or audio generative modeling.
- Track record of personally training and improving large-scale neural models.
- Command of the modern speech-generation stack and understanding of open problems in naturalness, expressiveness, controllability, robustness, voice consistency, and inference cost.
- History of setting research direction under uncertainty, prioritizing experiments, allocating resources, and killing non-working approaches.
- Experience leading researchers and research engineers through other technical leaders.
- AI as a default mode of work, with a rebuilt workflow around AI and a specific view of its limitations in speech research.
- Ability to make complex technical tradeoffs legible to product, engineering, and executive audiences.
Nice To Haves
- TTS or generative-audio models deployed at meaningful production scale.
- Experience building or substantially scaling a high-performing AI research organization.
- Sophisticated evaluation systems for generative speech.
- Experience with expressive or multilingual generation, voice cloning and adaptation, or controllable generation.
- Recognized external contributions (publications, open source, patents, invited talks) in speech synthesis, neural audio codecs, speech language models, or multimodal models.
- Experience in fast-moving startup or research environments that routinely take models from idea to production.
Responsibilities
- Own the TTS research and model roadmap, deciding which technical directions can materially improve speech generation quality.
- Drive advances in neural audio modeling, prosody, expressiveness, controllability, multilingual speech, voice identity, consistency, data and training strategy, post-training, and inference performance.
- Ensure research advances translate into measurable production gains.
- Review research, challenge assumptions, design experiments, diagnose model failures, and tackle high-leverage problems.
- Build evaluation and benchmarking systems to explain model improvements.
- Lead individual contributors and tech lead managers, hiring and developing talent.
- Hold an exceptionally high technical bar and set direction across sub-teams.
- Partner with engineering and product leadership on ship-readiness.
- Represent Deepgram's TTS research internally and externally.
Benefits
- Deepgram's voice-native foundation models are accessed through cloud APIs or as self-hosted and on-premises software.
- Backed by a recent Series C led by leading global investors and strategic partners.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Director
Education Level
No Education Listed
