Senior Platform Engineer

About AssemblyAI

At AssemblyAI, we’re building at the forefront of Speech AI, creating powerful models for speech-to-text and speech understanding available through a straightforward API. With more than 200,000 developers building on our API and over 5,000 paying customers, AssemblyAI is helping unlock and support the next generation of powerful, meaningful products built with AI. 

Progress in AI is moving at an unprecedented pace– and our team is made up of experts in AI research that are focused on making sure that our customers are able to stay on the cutting edge, with production-ready AI models that are constantly updating and improving as our team continues to improve accuracy, latency, and what’s possible with Speech AI. Our models consistently rank highest in industry benchmarks for accuracy, outperforming models from Google and Amazon, and up to 30% fewer hallucinations than OpenAI’s Whisper. Our models power more than 2 billion end-user experiences each day, helping companies better understand customer feedback, run more productive meetings with automated meeting notes, and helping improve childhood literacy via ed tech tools. 

We’ve raised funding by leading investors including Accel, Insight Partners, Y Combinator’s AI Fund, Patrick and John Collision, Nat Friedman, and Daniel Gross. We’re a remote team looking to build one of the next great AI companies, and are looking for driven, talented people to help us get there!

We are seeking a Senior Researcher to join our Research team. AssemblyAI's core strengths include developing best-in-class AI models in Speech and Natural Language Processing (NLP), writing optimized inference code, and serving models at scale with low latency and high availability. This role demands expertise in both applied research and engineering in Deep Learning. Key responsibilities include: Writing efficient, high-performance training code for large-scale models with billions of parameters on TPU clusters, optimizing code for both training and inference, rigorously evaluating models to ensure quality and performance, and 

collaborating closely with engineers to support data creation, data filtering, and model deployment. The ideal candidate will possess a fine-grained understanding of deep learning research and engineering, spanning both software and hardware. As a startup, we require the candidate to be flexible and willing to work across various stages of the Speech AI model lifecycle, from data processing to model training and analysis. The candidate should also proactively expand the scope of work with the goal of getting the models into production to delight customers. They will play a pivotal role in advancing major research initiatives designed for large-scale deployment to solve real-world use cases.

What You’ll Do:

• Train large-scale Speech AI models, including ASR and speech-focused multi-modal LLMs with billions of parameters.
• Write and optimize training code for maximum efficiency and memory utilization.
• Stay up-to-date on the latest AI research and share insights across the company.
• Collaborate with the technology leadership team to prioritize the research and engineering agenda, define project scopes, and lead their execution.

What You’ll Need:

• 2+ years of professional experience in deep learning research & development. 
• Demonstrated experience in all aspects of deep learning model development, including data acquisition and processing, implementation, model training, experimental analysis, and writing inference and evaluation code as an individual contributor. 
• Hands-on experience with JAX/TPUs and distributed training. 
• Excellent knowledge of GPU and TPU hardware. 
• Strong Python programming skills. 
• Strong written and verbal communication skills for technical matters. 

Nice to Have:

• Experience in training/fine-tuning (multimodal) Large Language Models. 
• Experience in LLM inference using frameworks like vLLM or JetStream. 

You may be a great fit if you:

• You have an ownership mindset
• You reach for cloud-native, vendor neutral solutions
• You write detailed documentation around operational processes
• You have previously worked at startups and have helped determine the best practices and direction for DevOps processes
• Detail-oriented, analytical, and creative problem solver with a passion for quality processes
• Ability to triage problems, prioritize accordingly, and propose a resolution
• Ability to work independently, raise issues and take corrective action
• A keen eye for detail

US Salary Range: $157,500 - $180,000 USD per year 

Working at AssemblyAI

We are a small but mighty group of startup veterans and experienced AI researchers with over 20 years of expertise in Machine Learning, Speech Recognition, and NLP. As a fully remote team, we’re looking for people to join our team who are ambitious, curious, and lead with integrity. We’re still in the early days of AI and of AssemblyAI’s journey, and are looking for teammates who won’t just fit in, but will help us define and build our company culture. 

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!

Keep Exploring AssemblyAI:

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Learn more about AI models for speech recognition

Core Transcription | Audio Intelligence | LeMUR | Try the Playground

Our $50M Series C fundraise