About this role
You will spend your time designing neural audio architectures, reviewing research, diagnosing model failures, and partnering with product and engineering teams to push speech-generation models into production. Deepgram is looking for a Director of Text-to-Speech Synthesis Research to lead the entire TTS program, covering strategy, model architecture, training pipelines, and evaluation metrics. This hands-on leadership position exists to drive breakthroughs in speech synthesis and ensure those advancements translate into real-world performance for voice AI products.
The ideal candidate possesses deep technical expertise in modern speech generation combined with a proven ability to lead and develop high-performing research teams. You will operate in an environment that moves at the rapid pace of AI, requiring comfort with continuous experimentation and an AI-first daily workflow.
What you will do
- Own the end-to-end text-to-speech research roadmap and decide which technical directions advance speech-generation quality.
- Drive advancements across neural audio modeling, prosody, expressiveness, controllability, multilingual speech, and inference performance.
- Review research, challenge technical assumptions, design experiments, and diagnose model failures directly.
- Build comprehensive evaluation and benchmarking frameworks that combine automated metrics with human perceptual assessment.
- Lead a team of individual contributors and tech lead managers while holding an exceptionally high technical bar.
- Partner closely with engineering and product leadership to ensure research models are ready for production deployment.
What you need
- Deep expertise in modern text-to-speech, speech generation, or audio generative modeling with a track record of training large-scale neural models.
- Strong command of the modern speech-generation stack and open problems regarding naturalness, robustness, and inference cost.
- Demonstrated history of setting research direction under uncertainty by prioritizing experiments and allocating compute resources.
- Experience leading researchers and research engineers through other technical leaders while maintaining technical influence.
- Fluent in an AI-first default mode of work with a clear perspective on current limitations in speech research.
- Ability to communicate complex technical tradeoffs clearly to product, engineering, and executive stakeholders.
Nice to have
- TTS or generative-audio models deployed at meaningful production scale.
- Built or substantially scaled a high-performing AI research organization.
- Sophisticated evaluation systems for generative speech, expressive or multilingual generation, and voice cloning.
- Recognized external contributions such as publications, open-source projects, patents, or invited talks.
- Experience in fast-moving startup or research environments taking models from idea to production.
Benefits
- Offers Equity
- Offers Bonus
Questions candidates ask
What is the remote work policy?
The location for this role is listed as USA - Remote.
What is the compensation range for this position?
The salary range for this role is $213K to $328.3K, and the position includes offers of equity and bonus.
What are the expectations around AI usage at the company?
Every team member is expected to actively use and experiment with advanced AI tools as a core part of their everyday work and operational rhythm.
What does the day-to-day leadership involvement look like?
This is a hands-on leadership role where you set direction and stay in the details, shaping architectures, experiments, training strategy, and evaluation.