Applied Researcher, Audio

About the role

As an Applied Researcher in Audio you will translate cutting‑edge research into models that function outside the lab, covering speech understanding, generation, representation learning and multimodal systems. The role bridges scientific exploration and practical implementation, leading experiments to open releases or production systems.

Key responsibilities

• Research and develop audio models for speech understanding, generation, alignment and representation learning.
• Explore model architectures that reason across audio, text, timing and related signals.
• Curate training data, improve annotation methods and build synthetic or model‑assisted data pipelines.
• Establish benchmarks that capture details missed by conventional audio metrics.
• Move quickly from papers to working experiments, scaling and optimizing models on modern GPU infrastructure.
• Collaborate with engineering to turn successful prototypes into reliable open models and product capabilities.

Required profile

• Strong background in speech, audio understanding, audio generation or representation learning.
• Applied research mindset balancing scientific novelty with measurable impact.
• Hands‑on experience with PyTorch, modern model architectures and large‑scale training.
• Ability to design rigorous experiments, choose meaningful metrics and interpret results.
• Proficiency in clean Python development beyond notebooks.
• MSc, PhD or equivalent practical experience in machine learning, speech processing or a related field.

Required skills

• Python
• PyTorch
• Deep learning for audio/speech
• Data pipeline development
• Model architecture design
• Experimentation and evaluation

What we offer

• Access to clinically grounded speech data.
• Freedom to work across the full audio research stack.
• Opportunities to publish models, datasets and benchmarks openly.
• Direct path from research to real‑world use.
• Close collaboration with a small, ambitious team.
• Attractive compensation, phantom stock options and company benefits.
• Hybrid working model in a beautiful office in Vienna’s First District.