Machine Learning Engineer (Speech/Audio)

About Plaud Inc.

Plaud Inc., incorporated in Delaware and headquartered in San Francisco, is pioneering AI-enabled interfaces for professional use to enhance intelligence, productivity, and performance. Since 2023, over 2.5 million users globally have adopted Plaud’s intelligent solutions. The company's mission is to augment human intelligence by capturing and organizing insights from conversations, enabling people to think more clearly, make quicker decisions, and execute tasks effectively.

Plaud combines cutting-edge hardware and software to push the boundaries of human-AI collaboration with strict adherence to data privacy and security standards, including ISO 27001, ISO 27701, SOC 2, GDPR, EN18031, and HIPAA compliances.

Why Join Plaud?

• Plaud is an independently-funded, rapidly expanding, profitable company with a revenue run rate of $300 million reached within three years.
• Opportunity to shape the forefront of human-AI interaction paradigms.
• Exposure to innovative AI tools for professional environments and a chance to contribute to the company's international growth.
• Collaborate with driven colleagues who prioritize creativity, teamwork, and customer success.
• Progress your career in a supportive culture focused on continuous learning and rapid professional development.
• Competitive salary, global reach, and an inspiring, creativity-driven workplace atmosphere.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain expansive speech and audio data pipelines supporting data ingestion, cleaning, filtering, labeling, augmentation, and quality assurance to enable robust model training processes.
• Collaborate closely with senior speech engineers on advanced term and hotword mining methods leveraging Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) outputs.
• Support the fine-tuning and evaluation of speech and language models, including SpeechLLM or general Large Language Models, focusing on enhancing recognition accuracy especially in handling code-switching, names, and specific product terms.
• Adapt models with domain-specific data to improve recognition capabilities tailored to key languages and industry verticals.
• Develop comprehensive test sets and evaluation frameworks utilizing keyword and domain lexicons, benchmarking internal models against open-source and commercial standards.

Required Qualifications and Experience

• At least one year of direct experience in speech technologies, machine learning, or managing large-scale data engineering projects.
• Proficiency in at least one area:
• Training, fine-tuning, or assessing ASR or SpeechLLM models.
• General machine learning or LLM model training and fine-tuning.
• Handling large-scale datasets — such as thousands of hours of audio or terabytes of multimodal data.
• Strong skills in Python programming and PyTorch framework.
• Experience with distributed data processing platforms like Spark or Ray, now essential due to end-to-end ownership of sizable data pipelines.

Preferred Skills

• Knowledge of SpeechLLM and self-supervised learning related to speech or familiarity with models like StepAudio or Qwen3-Omni.
• Previous involvement in building or enhancing hotword/contextual biasing systems or code-switching ASR improvements.
• Published research in premier conferences such as Interspeech, ICASSP, or possess patents related to speech technologies.
• Experience managing data workflows involving tens of thousands of hours of speech data for model training initiatives.

Benefits and Culture

• Employee Stock Ownership Plan granting real equity in Plaud’s long-term growth.
• Dynamic, fast-paced product environment where your contributions shape AI productivity's future.
• Access to cutting-edge AI productivity tools such as Gemini, Claude Code, and other leading AI systems to enhance engineering effectiveness.
• Top-tier equipment options including premium laptops, high-performance workstations, and exclusive Plaud devices for every new hire.
• Vibrant culture fostering craftsmanship, ownership, and speed, supported by annual retreats and team-building activities.
• Comprehensive health and insurance protections including medical insurance and Work Injury Compensation Act (WICA) coverage for all full-time employees.

Equal Opportunity Employer Statement

Plaud is dedicated to maintaining an inclusive workplace and prohibits discrimination based on race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetics, or any legally protected status.