Principal Acoustic Modelling Engineer

Location: Cambridge, UK

Contact: careers@speechmatics.com

Background

Speechmatics’ versatile automatic speech recognition technology, based on decades of research and experience in neural networks, is enabling world-leading companies to power a speech-enabled future. Having already transcribed millions of hours of audio and helped customers across a diverse range of use cases and applications, the team’s mission is to build the best speech technology for any application, anywhere, in any language and put speech back at the heart of communication.

In the office, we pride ourselves on a relaxed but productive environment enabling both commercial success and personal development - we often host lunch and learn sessions and attend regular academic and commercial conferences. When we're not working hard, we regularly host company outings and events where your plus-one is welcomed to enjoy great food, great drinks, and great company! We also reward ourselves occasionally with massages, and even get our bikes fixed onsite!

We think it’s important to give a little back too, so everyone is eligible for some time off for charity work plus we’ll match your contribution via the Give As You Earn scheme. See more about our great perks below!

We are expanding rapidly and are seeking talented people to join us as we continue to push 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 and experienced Acoustic Modelling expert 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, accuracy and support for all languages. Your role will include making sure our Acoustic Modelling capability remains at the head of the field. Your work will feed into the ‘Automatic Linguist’, our ground-breaking framework to support the building of ASR models, and hence the delivery of every language pack published by the company. Alongside the wider team you will be responsible for keeping our system the most accurate and useful commercial speech recognition available.

Because you will be joining a rapidly expanding 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. 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

• Analysing advances in the field of ASR – especially acoustic modelling – and reporting back on what is the latest and greatest

• Ensuring we can implement the best ASR technology in a production environment

• Leading the acoustic modelling extension of our ML framework

• Being part of a team delivering all the artefacts required to make up the best speech recognition available to our customers

Experience

Essential

• Proven track record as one of the best in the world at modern language modelling techniques for LVCSR

• Proven ability to effectively communicate highly technical subjects

Desirable

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

• Extensive experience working with standard acoustic modelling and ML toolkits, e.g. Kaldi, TensorFlow, etc.

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

• Experience translating academic advances in ASR into production systems

• Comprehensive knowledge of machine learning and statistical modelling

• Expertise in Python and/or C++ software development

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

• Experience of technical leadership of a team / teams

• Experience of team leadership and line management

• Experience of working in an Agile framework

Salary

We offer a competitive salary and bonus scheme, pension contribution matching and a generous EMI share option scheme. We also have several additional benefits including private medical insurance, holiday purchase, life assurance, childcare vouchers, cycle scheme, massages, bike doctor, fully stocked drinks fridge, and fresh fruit available daily to name just a few!