Senior Researcher

Why AssemblyAI AssemblyAI builds the best-in-class Voice AI models powering the next generation of voice applications. Our models serve 600M+ inference calls monthly, process 1M+ hours of audio daily, and power 2 billion+ end-user experiences. The Voice AI space is at an inflection point; we’re looking for folks truly excited to join a small team and help define the future of the industry. We are one of the most capital-efficient AI companies on the planet - with under 100 people generating roughly $500K ARR per employee, we sit among the top 5 most revenue-dense teams within the fastest-growing AI companies today. That's not an accident; it's a deliberate choice to stay lean, move fast, and give every person on the team outsized ownership and impact. With thousands of customers including Granola, Fireflies, Figure AI, and CallRail, the company has real scale - processing over 2 million hours of audio daily and handling more than 1 million API calls every day. This is a rare growth-stage opportunity where the business is proven and the trajectory is steep, but the team is still small enough that your fingerprints are on everything. If you've ever felt buried under layers of bureaucracy, starved of real ownership, or frustrated watching your work disappear into a slow-moving org, AssemblyAI is built differently. The company operates as a true meritocracy, with no heavy planning or approval processes and no gatekeeping on the tools or information you need. For anyone who genuinely cares about voice AI, not as a trend to chase, but as a technology to build,  this is the place where the most interesting problems at the most interesting scale are being solved by a team small enough that you'll actually know everyone's name. We’re committed to creating a space where our employees can bring their full selves to work and have equal opportunity to succeed. No matter your race, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, religion, origin, ability, age, veteran status, if joining this mission speaks to you, we encourage you to apply! About the Role We are seeking a highly capable Senior Researcher to push the boundaries of streaming speech recognition and speech understanding. This role sits at the intersection of cutting-edge research and production impact—you'll develop novel architectures and algorithms that ship to millions of users. The ideal candidate has deep expertise in both automatic speech recognition (ASR) and large language models, with strong foundations in streaming/online inference, neural transducers (RNN-T, CTC), and modern attention-based architectures. You're equally comfortable reading papers on speech language models and debugging distributed training runs. This is a unique opportunity to shape the next generation of Speech AI at a company experiencing rapid growth in one of the most dynamic fields in AI. You'll join the team developing Universal-Streaming—our production streaming ASR system—while exploring the frontier of LLM-based contextualization and real-time speech understanding. You'll work closely with research engineers and engineers to drive your research from prototype to production, ensuring novel ideas translate into real customer impact. What You’ll Do Design and develop novel streaming ASR architectures, pushing the boundaries of accuracy-latency tradeoffs in production systems. Research and prototype LLM-assisted speech-to-text —exploring how large language models can enhance streaming speech recognition and understanding. Develop new algorithms for streaming speaker diarization, contextual biasing, and multilingual speech recognition. Drive research from initial experimentation through rigorous evaluation to production deployment, working closely with engineering teams. Conduct systematic experiments on internal and public benchmarks, with careful attention to evaluation methodology and statistical rigor. Contribute to technical publications and represent AssemblyAI's research at top venues. Collaborate on research direction and technical strategy, helping shape the roadmap for Speech AI capabilities. What You’ll Need Strong research background in speech recognition, with deep understanding of classic streaming architectures (RNN-T, CTC) and modern attention mechanisms. Expertise in LLMs and language modeling , with ability to bridge speech and language model research. Proficiency in PyTorch and JAX/Flax —you can move fluidly between frameworks and implement complex architectures from scratch. Experience with large-scale distributed training and the practical challenges of scaling speech models. Track record of publications at top venues (ICASSP, Interspeech, NeurIPS, ICML) or equivalent industry impact. Strong experimental methodology—systematic approach to ablations, careful baseline comparisons, and rigorous evaluation. Ability to translate research insights into production-ready solutions; comfort working at the interface of research and engineering. Excellent communication skills—can articulate complex technical ideas clearly and collaborate effectively across teams. Pay Transparency: AssemblyAI strives to recruit and retain exceptional talent from diverse backgrounds while ensuring pay equity for our team. Our salary ranges are based on paying competitively for our size, stage, and industry, and are one part of many compensation, benefit, and other reward opportunities we provide. There are many factors that go into salary determinations, including relevant experience, skill level, qualifications assessed during the interview process, and maintaining internal equity with peers on the team. The range shared below is a general expectation for the function as posted, but we are also open to considering candidates who may be more or less experienced than outlined in the job description. In this case, we will communicate any updates in the expected salary range. The provided range is the expected salary for candidates in the U.S. Outside of those regions, there may be a change in the range which will be communicated to candidates throughout the interview process. Salary range: $210,000 - $309,000 The expected base compensation for this role is listed above. Our total compensation package includes competitive equity grants, 100% employer-paid benefits, and the flexibility of being fully remote. 401k match up to 4% for US-based full time team members. AI to Interview: If you’re selected for an interview, please review this resource to better understand how AssemblyAI approaches the use of AI in our interview process. GDPR privacy notice: Candidates from the EU should review this job applicant privacy notice before applying. Keep Exploring AssemblyAI: Speech-to-text | Streaming speech-to-text | Speech Understanding | LLM Gateway Try the Playground Our $50M Series C fundraise Check us out on YouTube!