Perceptual Audio Engineer (Research)

HARMAN International • Los Angeles, CA

6d • $134,250 - $196,900 • Hybrid

About The Position

The HARMAN Research Intelligent Audio team is working to set a new standard for audio: create experiences that understand the listener, adapt to their environment, and become more personal and useful over time. This can only be achieved when our customers can hear and experience the difference. As a Perceptual Audio Engineer in HARMAN Research, you will define what better sounds like and turn human listening into quantitative guidance for research and product decisions.
Reporting to the Director of Intelligent Audio, you will define perceptual targets, validate metrics, and build reusable evaluation methods and datasets. You will translate what people hear into practical criteria that researchers, engineers, and product teams can use. This is a hands-on research role for someone excited to combine psychoacoustics, experimental rigor, AI tools, and real-world product impact. Success means sound quality and tuning technology is rapidly deployed into products with confidence that listeners will hear the difference.

Requirements

• An advanced degree in acoustics, psychoacoustics, hearing science, auditory science, psychology, human factors, statistics, electrical engineering, computer science, or a related field, or demonstrated equivalent experience.
• Significant relevant experience, typically at least five years, in perceptual audio, audio quality evaluation, or related applied research and engineering.
• Strong command of psychoacoustics and experimental design, including sample size reasoning, controlled and blinded studies, repeated measures analysis, effect sizes, confidence intervals, reliability, and transparent treatment of exclusions and multiple comparisons.
• Experience selecting and applying recognized listening test methods, adapting them to the decision at hand, and documenting where a method is valid or unsuitable.
• Experience developing or validating perceptual models against independent human tests, including calibration, generalization, and clustering/subgroup performance.
• Practical fluency with Python, MATLAB, or equivalent analysis tools, together with reproducible code, data, and reporting practices.
• Ability to convert findings into practical criteria and gain adoption across research, engineering, validation, integration, and product teams.
• Demonstrated use of modern AI methods to improve a perceptual evaluation system or research workflow. You can explain what you built, how it was validated, and how it improved quality, speed, scale, or product outcomes.

Nice To Haves

• Experience evaluating loudspeakers, headphones, automotive audio, voice quality, or adaptive audio experiences.
• Knowledge of auditory physiology, neuroscience, or cognitive factors that materially affect listening behavior, sound quality, spatial perception, comfort, or fatigue.
• Experience creating perceptual metrics and methods that become shared organizational standards and improve decision speed and quality.
• Familiarity with embedded constraints for metrics built with machine learning and with the product validation systems that consume perceptual criteria.
• Patents, publications, or standards work in perceptual audio or audio quality evaluation. Demonstrated product impact matters more than credentials alone.

Responsibilities

• Define what good sounds like: Translate target user experiences into perceptual attributes and measurable success criteria.
• Design a perceptual research program: Build an ambitious program that advances perceptual audio science while addressing clear business and product needs.
• Develop and validate perceptual metrics: Create measures of perceived audio quality, validate them against independent listening data, and define their limits.
• Build reusable evaluation assets: Create datasets, test methods, analysis tools, and benchmarks that other teams can trust and reuse.
• Transfer evidence into products: Turn perceptual findings into product requirements, acceptance criteria, and regression tests in partnership with research and product teams.
• Improve the research workflow: Use AI and automation to make perceptual research faster and more scalable without sacrificing rigor.
• Explain practical significance: Communicate what results mean, how confident we are, and what teams should do next.

Benefits

• Access to employee discounts on world-class products from JBL, HARMAN Kardon, AKG, and more.
• Extensive training opportunities through HARMAN University.
• Competitive wellness benefits.
• Tuition reimbursement.
• The Be Brilliant employee recognition and rewards program.

What This Job Offers

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