ASR Engineer

ABOUT THE ROLE You'll own the transcription pipeline end-to-end at an early-stage ambient intelligence consumer startup — a cloud-based ASR system with a narrowly scoped on-device component. As one of the company's first US engineering hires, you'll work hands-on with senior product and business leadership to build, tune, debug, and ship pipeline improvements directly. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Build and iterate on the cloud-based ASR pipeline, from audio capture through post-processing, in production at scale. - Own ASR quality and reliability end-to-end, shipping measurable improvements across latency, small-word accuracy, and voice-print reliability. - Work across data, training/fine-tuning, evaluation, and deployment to translate product feedback into shipped pipeline changes. - Collaborate closely with overseas R&D, hardware, and supply-chain teams across time zones. - Partner with a product-focused backend engineer on shared pipeline surfaces. - Operate with minimal specification, turning lightweight asks into concrete, production-ready improvements. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - 3+ years building and tuning transcription/ASR pipelines end-to-end in production, primarily in cloud-based settings. - Demonstrated ownership of production ASR systems through the full lifecycle: data preparation, model training/fine-tuning, evaluation, and deployment. - Hands-on experience with latency-sensitive or streaming audio/ASR pipelines. - Track record of shipping pipeline improvements from design through deployment based on real production usage data. - Comfort debugging transcription quality issues (small-word accuracy, voice-print reliability, latency) in live systems. - Experience in early-stage or founding engineering environments — ships without large team support or fully-specified requirements. - On-device or embedded ML experience (Core ML, TensorFlow Lite, or similar frameworks). - Prior experience building wearable, hardware, or robotics device products. - Background at an AI-native consumer application focused on transcription or audio. - Experience building agent or LLM-based product features (tool use, memory, retrieval systems). - Cares how transcription feels to use — not just how it benchmarks — and makes latency/accuracy tradeoffs independently. COMPENSATION & BENEFITS Base salary $150,000 – $200,000 USD annually. Visa sponsorship is not available for this role. LOCATION Hybrid (3 days/week in office) — San Francisco Bay Area, California, USA.