Machine Learning Scientist (L4/L5) - Audio & Speech for Games

Netflix • Los Angeles, CA

1d

About The Position

At Netflix, our mission is to entertain the world. Together, we are writing the next episode - pushing the boundaries of storytelling, global fandom and making the unimaginable a reality. We are a dream team obsessed with the uncomfortable excitement of discovering what happens when you merge creativity, intuition and cutting-edge technology. Come be a part of what’s next.
The Team
The Studio Media Algorithms team is at the forefront of algorithmic innovation to enhance and support the creation of Netflix’s entertainment content, including games. In this role, you will be embedded within this team while collaborating very closely with a specialized Games Studio R&D team. This incubation-style team is chartered to lead our investments in building new kinds of games leveraging emerging technologies to support our creators and reach player audiences in new ways.
The Role
We are seeking a Machine Learning Scientist to redefine the auditory experience in Netflix games. This role requires an impact-oriented mindset, where you strategically balance the use of existing state-of-the-art tools with bespoke internal research to deliver high-quality, interactive audio at scale.

Requirements

• Speech & Audio Research Expertise: Deep foundation in deep learning and modern sequence modeling, with a proven track record of building and training speech/audio pipelines (ASR, TTS, diarization, VAD) at scale using PyTorch.
• Data-Centric Mindset: Skilled in data cleaning, curation, and the creation of synthetic data for complex evaluation and training pipelines.
• Pragmatic Innovator: Proven ability to navigate "build vs. buy" decisions, prioritizing production impact and "Netflix-quality" bars.
• Programming: Expert proficiency in Python; experience with C++ or Java.
• Creative Mindset: Passionate about using technology to solve creative challenges in game design, such as procedural storytelling or immersive soundscapes.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with multi-modal audio-visual models.
• Familiarity with digital signal processing (DSP) as it relates to real-time game audio engines.

Responsibilities

• Strategic Model Integration: Evaluation and integration of open-source and commercial models (e.g., for ASR, TTS, diarization, VAD), balancing quality, latency, and cost to accelerate game development.
• Model R&D & Adaptation: Lead the fine-tuning and adaptation of speech models (TTS, Voice Cloning, ASR) using parameter-efficient techniques (e.g., LoRA/PEFT) to address production gaps and creative constraints that external/commercial solutions cannot satisfy.
• Data & Alignment: Lead audio and multimodal data curation, including cleaning, segmentation, labeling, and synthetic data generation to support speech model training and adaptation.
• Scalable Training: Scale speech model training using distributed data pipelines and training strategies for large datasets.

Benefits

• Netflix provides comprehensive benefits including Health Plans, Mental Health support, a 401(k) Retirement Plan with employer match, Stock Option Program, Disability Programs, Health Savings and Flexible Spending Accounts, Family-forming benefits, and Life and Serious Injury Benefits.
• We also offer paid leave of absence programs.
• Full-time hourly employees accrue 35 days annually for paid time off to be used for vacation, holidays, and sick paid time off.
• Full-time salaried employees are immediately entitled to flexible time off.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed
• Number of Employees: 5,001-10,000 employees