Senior Researcher - Text to Speech | San Francisco jobs in United States
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smallest.ai · 11 hours ago

Senior Researcher - Text to Speech | San Francisco

positionSan Francisco, CA
timeFull-time
remoteOnsite
seniorityMid, Senior Level
money$200K/yr - $300K/yr
date3+ years exp

smallest.ai is a company focused on advancing Text-to-Speech technology, and they are seeking a Senior Researcher to lead research on TTS models. The role involves designing and training TTS systems, improving speech synthesis pipelines, and collaborating with engineering teams to translate research into production-ready systems.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)Generative AIInformation TechnologySaaSSoftware

Responsibilities

Lead research on Text-to-Speech models focused on naturalness, expressiveness, latency, and robustness
Design and train TTS systems for real-world voices across accents, languages, and speaking styles
Improve streaming and low-latency speech synthesis pipelines
Experiment with architectures, loss functions, and data strategies (multi-speaker training, style modeling, distillation, data augmentation)
Translate research ideas into production-ready TTS systems
Collaborate closely with infra, product, and voice engineering teams

Qualification

Text-to-Speech researchDeep learning frameworksReal-time TTS systemsModern TTS architecturesMultilingual speech synthesisPublications in ML conferencesConversational AI exposure

Required

Strong background in Text-to-Speech / speech generation research
Hands-on experience with deep learning frameworks (PyTorch preferred)
Experience with real-time or low-latency TTS systems
Familiarity with modern TTS architectures (Tacotron-style, FastSpeech, VITS, diffusion-based, neural vocoders)
Ability to think end-to-end: data → model → inference → deployment
Prior work in multilingual, expressive, or accented speech synthesis is a strong plus
3–6 years of specialized experience in speech through academia or industry
Master's or PhD in Speech, ML, or a related field

Preferred

Publications in top speech / ML conferences
Experience deploying TTS models in real-time production
Exposure to conversational AI or voice agents

Company

smallest.ai

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Smallest.ai is a Software Development developing a voice AI foundation models for enterprise deployment, sales and support.
dateFounded in 2023
location
San Francisco, California, USA
people-size2-10 employees
web-link
https://smallest.ai

Funding

Current Stage
Early Stage
Total Funding
$9M
Key Investors
Amazon Web ServicesSierra Ventures
2025-10-09Non Equity Assistance· $1M
2025-09-22Seed· $8M
2025-03-20Pre Seed

Leadership Team

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Apoorv Sood
Global Head of Go-To-Market
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Recent News

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Company data provided by crunchbase