Speech Scientist

About YAL YAL.ai (Your Alternative Life) is a revolutionary end-to-end communication and discovery platform reimagining how people connect, interact, and collaborate. We combine state-of-the-art AI with a Zero Trust Architecture, ensuring every interaction is private, secure, and intelligent. From on-device ASR models and multilingual speech-to-speech AI to fraud detection and real-time discovery systems, YAL.ai is building the future of secure communication. With our vision “Where AI Meets Integrity”. W e’re crafting an ecosystem where users experience privacy-first communication, intelligent discovery, and cutting-edge AI innovation at scale.

About The Role We are looking for a Speech Scientist to design, build, and improve speech and language models that enhance our product experiences. You will work on challenging problems across the speech processing stack, collaborate with a talented team, and deliver measurable impact through rigorous research and engineering.

Responsibilities

• Research, develop, and optimize models for speech translation, automatic speech recognition (ASR), text-to-speech (TTS), voice activity detection, speaker identification, speech enhancement or related areas
• Design and run experiments, analyze results, and iterate quickly to improve system performance
• Build robust data pipelines for training, evaluation, and deployment of speech models
• Collaborate with engineering teams to integrate speech models into production systems with attention to latency, accuracy, and scalability
• Stay current with the latest research, evaluate new techniques, and propose adoption where appropriate
• Contribute to technical documentation, internal knowledge sharing, and peer code reviews
• Participate in the hiring process and mentor junior team members

Qualifications

• Masters. in Speech Processing, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Computational Linguistics, or a related field
• 3+ years of hands-on experience developing speech or audio ML models in an industry setting
• Strong understanding of signal processing fundamentals, acoustic modeling, and language modeling
• Proficiency in Python and at least one deep learning framework (PyTorch preferred)
• Experience training and fine-tuning large neural network architectures (Transformers, Conformers, RNN-T, etc.)
• Solid software engineering skills and comfort working in production codebases
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with attention to experimental rigor
• Effective written and verbal communication skills

Nice to Have

• Publications at top speech or ML conferences
• Experience with streaming/real-time speech processing systems
• Familiarity with model compression, quantization, and on-device deployment
• Experience working with multilingual or low-resource speech data