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AI Prosody and Rhythm Modeling Engineer

Daniel Sokolov

Full-time · Job · Los_Angeles

About the role

Text-to-speech has solved intelligibility. The remaining frontier is naturalness — the subtle patterns of stress, rhythm, pacing, and intonation that make a voice sound human rather than robotic. BLEU scores and MOS ratings can measure the gap, but closing it requires a deep understanding of prosody as a linguistic phenomenon, not just a signal processing problem. Our TTS system powers voice interfaces for 90 enterprise clients, including automotive infotainment systems, healthcare communication tools, and audiobook production platforms. The current system scores 4.1 MOS; our target is 4.5+. The improvement requires better prosody modeling: sentence-level rhythm prediction, contextual emphasis patterns, and handling of edge cases like sarcasm, lists, and code-switching. You'll lead prosody research and engineering on a team of five. You'll design the prosody prediction models, build the training pipeline from labeled speech data, and validate quality with both automated metrics and human listening tests.

Responsibilities

  • Design and implement prosody prediction models for TTS post-processing
  • Build sentence-level rhythm and emphasis modeling from annotated speech corpora
  • Handle edge cases: sarcasm, enumeration, code-switching, and domain-specific terminology
  • Create automated prosody evaluation metrics correlated with human MOS ratings
  • Run human listening studies to validate model improvements
  • Publish research findings and contribute to the speech synthesis community

Requirements

  • 5+ years in speech synthesis, prosody modeling, or audio ML
  • Deep understanding of linguistic prosody theory and acoustic correlates
  • Strong PyTorch skills and experience with sequence-to-sequence architectures
  • Experience building and evaluating TTS systems end-to-end
  • Publications in speech synthesis, prosody, or computational linguistics preferred

Benefits

  • Fully remote
  • Research conference budget
  • Top-of-market compensation
  • Health, dental, and vision
  • Equity with 4-year vesting

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Categories

AI & Machine Learning Engineers NLP & Prompt Engineering

Skills

python pytorch hugging face docker aws

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Full-time

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Language

English

Salary Range

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AI Expertise

AI & Machine Learning Engineers NLP & Prompt Engineering

Skills

python pytorch hugging face docker aws statistics

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