Back to jobs
New

Research Engineer, Voice

Palo Alto, California, United States

About Inflection AI

Inflection AI is a Public Benefit Corporation empowering people with human-centered, emotionally intelligent AI. We’re shaping the future of AI by combining emotional intelligence (EQ) and raw intelligence (IQ) to elevate people’s potential.

Inflection AI created Pi, the world’s first emotionally intelligent AI, to help people work through decisions, emotions, and challenges. Pi is a personal AI agent powered by Inflection AI’s foundation model, proving that AI can be personal, empathetic, and contextually aware.

About the Role

We’re looking for a Member of Technical Staff (MTS), Research Engineer focused on voice and audio to help advance the spoken intelligence behind Pi. In this role, you’ll work at the intersection of research and production—developing, training, and shipping neural models across the full spectrum of voice: speech synthesis, recognition, audio generation, and real-time spoken dialogue. You’ll collaborate closely with ML engineers, product teams, and infrastructure to turn cutting-edge ideas in areas like neural audio codecs, diffusion-based TTS, and multimodal foundation models into the natural, expressive voice experiences that millions of Pi users interact with every day.

What You’ll Do

  • Research, develop, and optimize neural models for voice and audio—including text-to-speech, automatic speech recognition, audio generation, and spoken dialogue systems.
  • Build and maintain production-grade training and inference pipelines for voice models, with close attention to latency, naturalness, and scalability.
  • Run experiments end-to-end: data curation, model architecture design, training, evaluation, and ablation studies.
  • Collaborate with ML engineers, product teams, and infrastructure to integrate voice models into Pi’s real-time conversational stack.
  • Explore and apply advances in neural audio codecs, diffusion-based synthesis, streaming architectures, and multimodal foundation models to improve Pi’s voice experience.
  • Develop robust evaluation frameworks combining perceptual metrics, automated benchmarks, and user-facing quality signals.
  • Contribute to Inflection’s research culture through publications, internal reviews, and knowledge sharing.

What We’re Looking For

  • 2-5 years of research or engineering experience (including graduate work) in audio, speech, or multimodal ML.
  • Strong proficiency in PyTorch and hands-on experience training and debugging large-scale neural models on GPU/accelerator clusters.
  • Solid understanding of audio and speech fundamentals spectrograms, mel features, vocoders, codec-based representations, and signal processing.
  • Demonstrated ability to take a research idea from prototype to production: equally comfortable reading papers and writing efficient, CUDA-aware training loops.
  • Familiarity with modern generative architectures for audio (e.g., diffusion models, autoregressive codecs, flow-matching) and their trade-offs.
  • Clear, collaborative communication able to distill complex research into actionable insights for cross-functional partners.
  • Have a bachelor’s degree or equivalent in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Linguistics, or a related field; MS or PhD strongly preferred.


Employee Pay Disclosures

At Inflection AI, we aim to attract and retain the best employees and compensate them in a way that appropriately and fairly values their individual contributions to the company. For this role, Inflection AI estimates a starting annual base salary to fall within the range of $225,000 to $325,000, depending on a candidate’s qualifications and level of experience. This role also includes a meaningful equity component, allowing employees to share in the long-term success of the company.

Benefits

Inflection AI values and supports our team’s mental and physical health. We are focused on building a positive, safe, inclusive and inspiring place to work. Our benefits include: 

  • Diverse medical, dental and vision options 
  • 401k matching program 
  • Unlimited paid time off 
  • Parental leave and flexibility for all parents and caregivers
  • Support of country-specific visa needs for international employees living in the Bay Area

Create a Job Alert

Interested in building your career at Inflection AI? Get future opportunities sent straight to your email.

Apply for this job

*

indicates a required field

Resume/CV*

Accepted file types: pdf, doc, docx, txt, rtf

Cover Letter

Accepted file types: pdf, doc, docx, txt, rtf

Education

Select...
Select...
Select...

Voluntary Self-Identification

For government reporting purposes, we ask candidates to respond to the below self-identification survey. Completion of the form is entirely voluntary. Whatever your decision, it will not be considered in the hiring process or thereafter. Any information that you do provide will be recorded and maintained in a confidential file.

As set forth in Inflection AI’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.

Select...
Select...
Race & Ethnicity Definitions

If you believe you belong to any of the categories of protected veterans listed below, please indicate by making the appropriate selection. As a government contractor subject to the Vietnam Era Veterans Readjustment Assistance Act (VEVRAA), we request this information in order to measure the effectiveness of the outreach and positive recruitment efforts we undertake pursuant to VEVRAA. Classification of protected categories is as follows:

A "disabled veteran" is one of the following: a veteran of the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service who is entitled to compensation (or who but for the receipt of military retired pay would be entitled to compensation) under laws administered by the Secretary of Veterans Affairs; or a person who was discharged or released from active duty because of a service-connected disability.

A "recently separated veteran" means any veteran during the three-year period beginning on the date of such veteran's discharge or release from active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval, or air service.

An "active duty wartime or campaign badge veteran" means a veteran who served on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service during a war, or in a campaign or expedition for which a campaign badge has been authorized under the laws administered by the Department of Defense.

An "Armed forces service medal veteran" means a veteran who, while serving on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service, participated in a United States military operation for which an Armed Forces service medal was awarded pursuant to Executive Order 12985.

Select...

Voluntary Self-Identification of Disability

Form CC-305
Page 1 of 1
OMB Control Number 1250-0005
Expires 04/30/2026

Why are you being asked to complete this form?

We are a federal contractor or subcontractor. The law requires us to provide equal employment opportunity to qualified people with disabilities. We have a goal of having at least 7% of our workers as people with disabilities. The law says we must measure our progress towards this goal. To do this, we must ask applicants and employees if they have a disability or have ever had one. People can become disabled, so we need to ask this question at least every five years.

Completing this form is voluntary, and we hope that you will choose to do so. Your answer is confidential. No one who makes hiring decisions will see it. Your decision to complete the form and your answer will not harm you in any way. If you want to learn more about the law or this form, visit the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) website at www.dol.gov/ofccp.

How do you know if you have a disability?

A disability is a condition that substantially limits one or more of your “major life activities.” If you have or have ever had such a condition, you are a person with a disability. Disabilities include, but are not limited to:

  • Alcohol or other substance use disorder (not currently using drugs illegally)
  • Autoimmune disorder, for example, lupus, fibromyalgia, rheumatoid arthritis, HIV/AIDS
  • Blind or low vision
  • Cancer (past or present)
  • Cardiovascular or heart disease
  • Celiac disease
  • Cerebral palsy
  • Deaf or serious difficulty hearing
  • Diabetes
  • Disfigurement, for example, disfigurement caused by burns, wounds, accidents, or congenital disorders
  • Epilepsy or other seizure disorder
  • Gastrointestinal disorders, for example, Crohn's Disease, irritable bowel syndrome
  • Intellectual or developmental disability
  • Mental health conditions, for example, depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety disorder, schizophrenia, PTSD
  • Missing limbs or partially missing limbs
  • Mobility impairment, benefiting from the use of a wheelchair, scooter, walker, leg brace(s) and/or other supports
  • Nervous system condition, for example, migraine headaches, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis (MS)
  • Neurodivergence, for example, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism spectrum disorder, dyslexia, dyspraxia, other learning disabilities
  • Partial or complete paralysis (any cause)
  • Pulmonary or respiratory conditions, for example, tuberculosis, asthma, emphysema
  • Short stature (dwarfism)
  • Traumatic brain injury
Select...

PUBLIC BURDEN STATEMENT: According to the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995 no persons are required to respond to a collection of information unless such collection displays a valid OMB control number. This survey should take about 5 minutes to complete.