Engineering Manager, Machine Learning

Who We Are: WellSaid 

WellSaid is the leading AI voice company for enterprise and professional applications. Using carefully sourced voice talent and our own AI advanced platform, WellSaid provides ultra-realistic voices that the world’s biggest brands trust to engage listeners. We build AI responsibly and ethically. 

Who You Are: A People-First Engineering Leader Who Drives Impactful Execution

An experienced and collaborative engineering manager, you are an empathetic leader and a strong communicator. You thrive in a startup environment, have experience building up engineering teams to productize research, and have prior experience managing machine learning teams. You are passionate about pushing the state-of-the-art in deep learning, ethically. 

How You’ll Contribute:  

As an Engineering Manager of Machine Learning, you will work closely with our Engineering Leadership to instill best practices, drive execution on complex and pioneering deep learning efforts, and mentor our teammates. You will play a critical role in providing technical guidance—pushing back on design ideas and processes when needed, asking the right questions, and fostering a culture of thoughtful execution. Your leadership will help shape the direction of our ML initiatives, ensuring both technical excellence and strategic impact. You will lead our team in improving our state-of-the-art text-to-speech models. You will be leading both our software engineering and data engineers in maturing our platform and applying our research.

In your day-to-day, you'll:

• Build and lead a high-performing and collaborative machine learning team, fostering an environment of innovation, growth, and accountability.
• Collaborate with Product Management and other stakeholders to define, prioritize, and deliver the ML roadmap, aligning it with business goals and technical feasibility.
• Ensure that complex projects are effectively scoped, planned, executed, and delivered on time while meeting cross-team quality standards.
• Oversee multiple concurrent machine learning projects simultaneously, facilitating planning, and generally ensuring that deliverables are met on time. 
• Own and run team standups, sprint planning, and other delivery ceremonies.
• Work one-on-one with team members to meet their needs, providing regular and constructive feedback. You’ll show concern and success for the well-being of others and do what you can to support people. 
• Conduct design, code and pull request reviews with the team.
• Champion best practices in machine learning and software engineering including testing, documentation, readability, defensibility, etc. 
• Manage team resources effectively by prioritizing projects based on impact while balancing budget constraints for infrastructure (e.g., compute resources) or tooling needs.
• Foster customer empathy within the team by introducing real-world use cases, facilitating discussions on customer pain points, reviewing feedback loops, and ensuring alignment with user needs. 
• All together you’ll foster an inclusive team culture and working environment.

What We’re Looking For 

To thrive in this role, you ideally have extensive experience in leading high-performing engineering teams. Ideally with, but not required, knowledge in building deep learning models in PyTorch.

 Ideally, you also have some combination of the following:

• 5+ years of experience managing a software engineering team and a proven track record.
• 2+ years of experience using Cloud platforms (GCP, AWS, etc), 
• Background in Machine learning frameworks (such as PyTorch), and data processing tools (Spark, Pandas, etc.) are a big bonus but not mandatory. 
• You are proficient in software development practices, including specing, documenting, testing, reviewing, deploying, and monitoring, and are passionate about writing clean, defensible code.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills to work effectively with cross-functional teams, including software engineers, data engineers, product managers, execs, and other stakeholders.
• You are flexible and capable of working with a diverse team with various communication styles and needs. You are empathic and supportive.
• You create equitable processes across the entire employee lifecycle. You are particularly mindful of addressing the needs of marginalized people.
• Experience in text-to-speech, speech-to-text, audio libraries, or cloud storage is a bonus.

 To join our team you must also:

• Be a U.S. Citizen or Permanent Resident
• pass a pre-employment background check 
  
  

What We Offer 

WSL is proud to support an inclusive work environment that emphasizes each team member’s personal and professional growth. Our team is fully distributed throughout the U.S., and we support flexible schedules - work where and when you work best. You’ll have teammates just a Slack message or video call away if you ever need help solving an exciting challenge, or even if you just have a funny story to tell.

Other perks and benefits: 

• Competitive salary and stock options
• Full medical, dental, and vision insurance
• Matching 401(k) plan
• Generous vacation policy/paid time off
• Parental leave
• Learning & development stipend
• Home office stipend

As a startup, we strive to be externally competitive with companies at a similar size and stage, and internally fair in our pay practices. The hiring salary range for this role is $185,000 - $220,000  and represents the target offer range given the scope and experience expectations for this role.

What to Expect From Us 

We strongly encourage you to apply! If we feel your skills, experience, and values match, we’ll reach out about meeting with the team. 

During the interview stage, you can expect:

• An introductory interview with recruiting (30-45 minutes).
• An interview with our CPTO (45 minutes); if there’s a match we’ll schedule an interview loop with the team.
• An Interview loop with 4 interviews (1 hour each) with the team members you will be potentially working with, 1 of which will incorporate coding elements.

All interviews will be remote via Google Meet; we are happy to make accommodations you might need to feel comfortable and set up for success in our process. 

WellSaid Labs is honored to be an equal-opportunity workplace. We realize that by bringing together teams rich in diverse thoughts and experiences, our people, company, and customers are free to flourish. We are committed to providing equal employment opportunities regardless of race, color, national origin, religion, creed, genetic information, sex (including pregnancy, sexual orientation or gender identity), age, marital status, disability, military or veteran status; or any other protected classifications or characteristics under applicable local laws.