Senior Speech Scientist

Position : Senior Speech ScientistLocation : HyderabadType : Full-Time CTC : Competitive

About YAL

YAL.ai (Your Alternative Life) is a revolutionary end-to-end communication and discovery platform reimagining how people connect, interact, and collaborate.We combine state-of-the-art AI with a Zero Trust Architecture, ensuring every interaction is private, secure, and intelligent. From on-device ASR models and multilingual speech-to-speech AI to fraud detection and real-time discovery systems, YAL.ai is building the future of secure communication.With our vision "Where AI Meets Integrity". We're crafting an ecosystem where users experience privacy-first communication, intelligent discovery, and cutting-edge AI innovation at scale.

About the Role

We are looking for a Senior Speech Scientist to design, build, and improve speech and language models that enhance our product experiences. You will work on challenging problems across the speech processing stack, collaborate with a talented team, and deliver measurable impact through rigorous research and engineering.

ResponsibilitiesResearch, develop, and optimize models for speech translation, automatic speech recognition (ASR), text-to-speech (TTS), voice activity detection, speaker identification, speech enhancement or related areasDesign and run experiments, analyze results, and iterate quickly to improve system performanceBuild robust data pipelines for training, evaluation, and deployment of speech modelsCollaborate with engineering teams to integrate speech models into production systems with attention to latency, accuracy, and scalabilityStay current with the latest research, evaluate new techniques, and propose adoption where appropriateContribute to technical documentation, internal knowledge sharing, and peer code reviewsParticipate in the hiring process and mentor junior team members

QualificationsMasters. in Speech Processing, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Computational Linguistics, or a related field4+ years of hands-on experience developing speech or audio ML models in an industry settingStrong understanding of signal processing fundamentals, acoustic modeling, and language modelingProficiency in Python and at least one deep learning framework (PyTorch preferred)Experience training and fine-tuning large neural network architectures (Transformers, Conformers, RNN-T, etc.)Solid software engineering skills and comfort working in production codebasesStrong analytical and problem-solving skills with attention to experimental rigorEffective written and verbal communication skills

Nice to HavePublications at top speech or ML conferencesExperience with streaming/real-time speech processing systemsFamiliarity with model compression, quantization, and on-device deploymentExperience working with multilingual or low-resource speech data