Senior Researcher

About AssemblyAI AssemblyAI builds the best-in-class Speech 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—from voice agents and meeting assistants to contact centers and medical scribes. Companies like Zoom, Granola, Fireflies, Cluely, and Calabrio rely on AssemblyAI to ship production-ready voice AI. We're at an inflection point in Speech AI. We released Universal-Streaming in mid-2025, and it has quickly earned its place as the model offering the best accuracy-latency-cost tradeoff on the market. Our research team drives these advances and ships with relentless velocity. Since releasing Universal-Streaming, we've already launched keyterms prompting feature and multilingual support—with more significant improvements on the roadmap. We've raised $115M+ from Accel, Insight Partners, Y Combinator's AI Fund, Patrick and John Collison, Nat Friedman, and Daniel Gross. We're a remote team building one of the next great AI companies—and we're looking for researchers who will shape its future. 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. 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! Using 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: Keep Exploring AssemblyAI: Check us out on YouTube! Learn more about AI models for speech recognition Speech-to-Text | Speech Understanding | LLM Gateway | Try the Playground Our $50M Series C fundraise