ASR Engineer

About the Role

This is an early engineering hire at a seed-stage ambient intelligence consumer startup, where you will own the transcription pipeline end-to-end, from audio capture through post-processing. You will work hands-on with product and general management leadership, making real tradeoffs between latency, accuracy, and reliability as the product evolves.

What You'll Do

• Build and iterate on a cloud-based ASR pipeline in production at scale, covering audio capture through post-processing.
• Own ASR quality and reliability end-to-end, shipping measurable improvements on latency, small-word accuracy, and voice-print reliability.
• Work across data preparation, model training and fine-tuning, evaluation, and deployment to translate product feedback into shipped pipeline changes.
• Collaborate closely with R&D, hardware, and supply-chain teams across time zones.
• Partner with a Product Engineer on shared backend and pipeline surfaces.
• Operate with minimal specification, turning loosely defined asks into concrete, production-ready improvements.

What We're Looking For

• 3 or more years building and tuning transcription and ASR pipelines end-to-end in production, primarily in cloud-based settings.
• Demonstrated experience with latency-sensitive or streaming audio and ASR pipelines.
• Proficiency across the full ML lifecycle: data handling, model training and fine-tuning, evaluation metrics, and production deployment.
• Experience making latency, accuracy, and reliability tradeoffs in production systems based on real user feedback.
• Comfort working in early-stage or founding engineering environments with minimal specifications and small teams.
• On-device or embedded ML experience (Core ML, TensorFlow Lite, or similar frameworks) is a strong plus.
• Prior experience with wearable, hardware, or robotics device products is a plus.
• Background in AI-native consumer applications focused on transcription or audio is a plus.
• Experience building agent or LLM-based product features, including tool use, memory, or retrieval systems, is a plus.

Compensation & Benefits

Base salary: $150,000 to $200,000 USD annually. Equity participation included. Visa sponsorship is not available.

Location

Hybrid, 3 days per week in office, in the San Francisco Bay Area, California.