Senior Speech Recognition Engineers

Senior Speech Recognition Engineer

Location:         Cambridge, UK

Background

Speechmatics is a leader in automatic speech recognition (ASR). Using proprietary technology, we have built one of the most accurate ASR systems in the world, with a vision to power a voice-enabled economy. We are already working at a time when the global economy is actively adopting all types of speech-related technologies. In developing our technology we combine our years of experience, the latest developments in the field and our own focus on cutting-edge research to produce a world-class service.

In the office, we pride ourselves on a relaxed but productive environment whilst we stay in touch with the progress of others by attending both academic and commercial conferences and have fun together with regular outings (in the past we have been punting, go-karting, attended a cooking workshop and played bubble football...).

We are expanding rapidly and are seeking more people in the coming months to help us keep pushing the boundaries of speech recognition. This is an opportunity to join a high growth team and form a major part of its future direction.

The Opportunity

We are looking for a talented scientist to help us build the best speech technology for anybody, anywhere, in any language. You will be a part of a team that is responsible for Auto-Auto, our ground-breaking framework to support the building of ASR models, and hence the delivery of every language pack published by the company. This will involve maintaining and improving our pipeline, keeping our speech recognition at the head of the field and solving the challenges of a growing language portfolio.

Because you will be joining a small team, you will need to be a team player who thrives in a fast paced environment, with a focus on product delivery. Bringing skills to the team is as important as a can-do attitude. We strongly encourage versatility and knowledge transfer within the team, so we can share efficiently what needs to be done to meet our commitments to the rest of the company.

Our work typically relies on very large quantities of data, state-of-the-art methods (and our secret ingredients). Auto-Auto and the languages we are covering is core to our business. You should therefore be passionate about building products that will be used in businesses and homes worldwide.

Key Responsibilities

• Delivering high quality language models on time.
• Cracking the challenges of an ever-growing portfolio (e.g. think tones, synthetics languages with rich morphology or agglutination, under resourced languages, etc.) with pragmatism and flexibility in mind.
• Participating in the software development cycle of Auto-Auto.
• Keeping an eye on the field and technological advances to stay ahead of the game.
• Helping with the never ending problem of data acquisition: we always need more.

Experience

• Graduate degree in statistics, engineering, mathematics, or computer science.
• Expertise in key natural language processing technologies, such as speech recognition, text to speech or natural language understanding.
• Experience working with standard NLP toolkits, e.g. Kaldi, KenLM, etc.
• Solid programming skills with at least one scripting language (e.g. Python, Perl, Ruby, etc).
• Experience using Unix/Linux.
• Analytical mind-set with a data-driven approach to making decisions and real attention to detail.
• Experience of working within a team.
• PhD degree.
• Demonstrable commercial work experience in a directly related field.
• Expertise in modern speech recognition, including WFSTs, lattice processing, neural net (RNN / DNN / LSTM), acoustic and language models, Viterbi decoding.
• Comprehensive knowledge of machine learning and statistical modelling.
• Experience in deep machine learning and related toolkits, e.g. Theano, Torch, etc.
• Expertise in Python and/or C++.
• Experience working effectively with software engineering teams or as a Software Engineer.

Salary

We offer a competitive salary, bonus scheme, pension contribution matching (up to 5%) and a generous EMI share option scheme. We also have several additional benefits including holiday purchase, massages, fully stocked beer fridge, Cyclescheme, fruit boxes and many more.

The overall package will depend on your motivations and level of experience.