Senior Machine Learning Engineer_Linguistics and Speech

ServiceNow•Santa Clara, CA

11d

About The Position

As a Senior Voice AI Engineer – Linguistics & Speech, you will contribute linguistic and speech expertise to the design, development, and implementation of Voice AI applications and the core Voice Platform, including speech recognition, conversation management, and speech generation. You will own language support end to end by adding languages and locales and maintaining language-specific instructions, normalization, and pronunciation rules. You will analyze speech problems across languages, accents, and dialects; diagnose failures in production calls; and work with teams to resolve them. The role partners with engineering and product teams, contributes code, supports customers’ use cases, designs linguistic experiments to guide technology choices, builds AI-assisted analysis tooling, and mentors colleagues across linguistics and Voice AI engineering. ServiceNow describes itself as an AI platform company supporting business reinvention. The role’s stated base pay is $161,300–$274,200, plus equity when applicable, variable or incentive compensation, and benefits. Compensation varies by qualifications, skill level, competencies, and work location. Work personas may be flexible, remote, or required in office, depending on the work and assigned location; the posting does not specify the persona for this role.

Requirements

Master’s or PhD in Linguistics, Cognitive Science, or a related field.
Specialization in phonetics, acoustics, psycholinguistics, or cognitive science, with an applied or interdisciplinary rather than theoretical linguistics focus.
At least 4 years of experience in large-scale experiment design and quantitative research projects in an industry setting or applied research.
Hands-on experience building Voice AI applications.
Development experience with Python or similar languages.
Deep knowledge of the structure of several languages.
Ability to explain linguistic findings clearly to engineers, product managers, and customers.
Self-starter, outcome-driven mindset and ability to work with many stakeholders.
Ability to think critically about integrating AI into work, including hands-on experience with AI tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, or Windsurf.

Nice To Haves

Fluency in a language other than English.
Experience evaluating speech recognition and speech synthesis systems.
Experience building applications on top of LLMs, including prompt engineering.

Responsibilities

Contribute to the design, development, and implementation of Voice AI applications, bringing linguistic and speech expertise to the Voice Platform.
Own language support end to end by adding languages and locales and maintaining language-specific instructions, normalization, and pronunciation rules.
Analyze complex speech problems across languages, accents, and dialects.
Work with other linguists to map the problem space of specific languages.
Diagnose language and speech failures in production calls, identify the responsible component, and drive fixes with the team.
Partner with engineers to identify and solve linguistic problems and contribute code to features that power the user experience.
Partner with product managers to engage customers, understand their use cases and linguistic challenges, and build for their success.
Design linguistic experiments to inform technology choices, including speech-to-text and text-to-speech models and vendors.
Build tooling, with the help of AI, to analyze linguistic problems at scale.
Mentor colleagues and promote knowledge-sharing across linguistics and Voice AI engineering disciplines.