Lead Speech Recognition Engineer

Location: Cambridge, UK

Contact: careers@speechmatics.com

Background

Speechmatics is a leader in automatic speech recognition (ASR). Using proprietary technology, we have built one of the most accurate ASR systems in the world, with a vision to power a voice-enabled economy. We are already working at a time when the global economy is actively adopting all types of speech-related technologies. In developing our technology we combine our years of experience, the latest developments in the field and our own focus on cutting-edge research to produce a world-class service.

In the office, we pride ourselves on a relaxed but productive environment whilst we stay in touch with the progress of others by attending both academic and commercial conferences and have fun together with regular outings (in the past we have been punting, go-karting, attended a cooking workshop and played bubble football...).

We are expanding rapidly and are seeking more people in the coming months to help us keep pushing the boundaries of speech recognition. This is an opportunity to join a high growth team and form a major part of its future direction.

The Opportunity

We are looking for a talented speech scientist to help us build the best speech technology for anybody, anywhere, in any language. You will be a part of a team that is working on our core ASR capabilities to improve our speed and accuracy and develop novel features so that we can support all languages. Your work will feed into ‘Auto-Auto’, our ground-breaking framework to support the building of ASR models, and hence the delivery of every language pack published by the company. You will be responsible for keeping our system the most accurate and useful commercial speech recognition available.

Because you will be joining a small team, you will need to be a team player who thrives in a fast paced environment, with a focus on rapidly moving research developments into products. Bringing skills to the team is as important as a can-do attitude. We strongly encourage versatility and knowledge transfer within the team, so we can share efficiently what needs to be done to meet our commitments to the rest of the company.

Key Responsibilities

• Ensuring that our speech recognition meets or exceeds that published by others

• Improving our core modelling (acoustic, pronunciation, language)

• Leading the extension of our ML framework so that we can build any language

Experience

Essential

• MSc, PhD or equivalent experience in the academic aspects of speech recognition

• Several years practical experience in speech recognition, covering all aspects (acoustic, pronunciation and language modelling as well as decoders/search)

• Experience working with standard speech and ML toolkits, e.g. Kaldi, KenLM, TensorFlow, etc.

• Solid programming skills with Python and / or C/C++

• Experience using Unix/Linux for big data

Desirable

• PhD degree

• Experience of team leadership and line management

• Experience of working in an Agile framework

• Expertise in modern speech recognition, including WFSTs, lattice processing, neural net (RNN / DNN / LSTM), acoustic and language models, Viterbi decoding

• Comprehensive knowledge of machine learning and statistical modelling

• Experience in deep machine learning and related toolkits, e.g. Theano, Torch, etc.

• Deep expertise in Python and/or C++ software development

• Experience working effectively with software engineering teams or as a Software Engineer

Salary

We offer a competitive salary, bonus scheme, pension contribution matching (up to 5%) and a generous EMI share option scheme. We also have several additional benefits including holiday purchase, massages, fully stocked beer fridge, Cyclescheme, fruit boxes and many more.

The overall package will depend on your motivations and level of experience.