Inflection AI

Inflection AI

Principal Research & Engineering, Realtime Voice AI

Palo Alto, California, United States · Principal

Sponsorship not specified$400k-$550kDetected 22 days ago
LLMsAgentic AIResearch

About the role

  • Voice is becoming the highest-stakes interface for AI, where quality depends on speed, naturalness, interruption handling, emotional nuance, and reliability in real-world conditions.

Responsibilities

  • Utilize a 1,000 GPU cluster to support performance benchmarking and extensive experimentation.
  • Determine build-vs-buy-vs-train strategies for core audio, speech, and realtime interaction components.
  • Collaborate with infrastructure, product, design, and agentic AI teams to deploy voice agents for enterprise workflows.
  • Develop evaluation systems measuring voice quality through metrics such as clarity, emotional appropriateness, interruption handling, task success, user preference, latency, and reliability, moving beyond standard WER.
  • We are focused on building a positive, safe, inclusive and inspiring place to work.
  • Support of country-specific visa needs for international employees living in the Bay Area
  • Ability to lead senior technical talent while staying close to the code, architecture, and debugging work.

Requirements

  • Experience leading or serving as a principal Research and Engineering contributor to realtime voice, speech, audio AI, or conversational AI systems in production.
  • Experience with one or more of: streaming ASR, TTS, speech-to-speech systems, speech LLMs, audio tokenization, multimodal models, barge-in, low-latency inference, or realtime agents.
  • Ability to define voice quality in terms of user and customer outcomes, not only offline model metrics.
  • Experience designing or using evaluation systems that capture real user experience.
  • Have a bachelor's degree or equivalent in a related field to the offered position requirements

Compensation

  • For this role, Inflection AI estimates a starting annual base salary to fall within the range of $400,000 to $550,000, depending on a candidate's qualifications and level of experience.

Benefits

  • Our benefits include:
  • Diverse medical, dental and vision options
  • Unlimited paid time off
  • Parental leave and flexibility for all parents and caregivers

Company info

  • What We're Looking For

Visa & Work Authorization

  • Support of country-specific visa needs for international employees living in the Bay Area

This listing is sourced directly from Inflection AI's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.