Senior Machine Learning Engineer

ServiceNow•Santa Clara, CA

9d•$161,300 - $274,200

About The Position

The role focuses on contributing linguistic and speech expertise to ServiceNow’s Voice AI platform, including speech recognition, conversation management, and speech generation. Responsibilities span language support, speech problem analysis, production issue diagnosis, experimentation, tooling, and collaboration with engineering, product, customers, and other linguists. The posting describes the position as “Staff Voice AI Engineer – Linguistics & Speech,” although the listed job title is Senior Machine Learning Engineer.

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 across speech recognition, conversation management, and speech generation.
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, trace them to the responsible component, and drive fixes with the team.
Partner with engineers to identify and solve linguistic problems and contribute code to features that support the user experience.
Partner with product managers and customers to understand use cases and linguistic challenges and build for customer success.
Design linguistic experiments to guide technology choices, including speech-to-text and text-to-speech models and vendors.
Build tools, with the help of AI, to analyze linguistic problems at scale.
Mentor colleagues and promote knowledge-sharing across linguistics and Voice AI engineering disciplines.