Speech scientist at ELSA

Location: Lisbon, Portugal

contact: people@elsaspeak.com

Job Description

We are looking for an splendid Speech Scientist to join our team al ELSA and help us in our mission to help every language learner speak a foreign language fluently and confidently.

As a speech scientist al ELSA you will be playing with state-of-the-art machine learning and applying them to tons of audio and text data, towards building new technology and improving existing algorithms.

At ELSA you will not do your job alone. Solving a problem includes working with a team (backend, speech scientists, product managers, designers) to design solutions that would impact hundreds of thousands of users. We are an agile team. We are passionate engineers. We are highly collaborative. We value results. We go above and beyond to help our users and to deliver superb products, but we also value work-life balance - we are motorcycle riders, mountain climbers, food-enthusiasts, espresso lovers, yoga students, proud parents.

With more than 1.5M app downloads, your research will be directly influenced and will influence the many thousands of users that use our app daily.

Your role

• Investigate and implement new technology in speech and natural language processing.

• Postprocess, organize and put to use the myriad of data collected daily from the usage of the ELSA app.

• Propose new features and investigate their technical feasibility at scale, in a production environment. Work with the CTO and development engineers to turn research into reality.

• Work with the rest of the speech scientists to define the future of the speech and NLP technology used at ELSA.

• Maintain and improve the current speech and NLP technology stack following state-or-the-art developments and availability of new training data.

Requirements

• PhD in speech technology or related area (Masters level + related experience will also be considered).

• Proven research and publications track record that shows you can think on your own and come up with novel approaches to state-of-the-art problems.

• Outstanding coding skills. You should be able to program in low level languages like C++, high level prototyping using Python, Matlab, or similar; and be able to glue all them together using bash scripts.

• Enthusiasm and readiness to dig into production results to correct corner cases of your algorithms and iterate to better technology.

• Acquainted with deep learning open source packages (Theano, tensor flow, Caffe, Torch,...) and experience using Kaldi ASR.

What we offer

• Competitive salary and stock options according to seniority

• Company laptop

• Flexible working hours

• Ample room to grow professionally

• Experience the true startup spirit of a fast growing and well funded Silicon Valley startup

Application

Send your  LinkedIn profile or your CV to people@elsaspeak.com and we will get in touch.

About us

ELSA (English Language Speech Assistant) Corp. is a San Francisco-based startup with engineering offices in Lisbon. Our vision is to enable everyone to speak foreign languages with full confidence, reaching better life and career opportunities. Our flagship product, ELSA speak, is a personal mobile coach who improves our users' English pronunciation and intonation using phoneme and suprasegmental analysis of the user's speech signal. Our backend servers implement state-of-the-art speech recognition technology to pinpoint errors and give accurate and consistent feedback to our users on how to improve.