{"id":69733,"url":"https://alion.io/job/inflection-principal-research-engineering-realtime-voice-ai","title":"Principal Research & Engineering, Realtime Voice AI","company":{"id":31705,"name":"Inflection AI","domain":"inflection.ai","url":"https://alion.io/company/inflection-ai","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Greenhouse","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":75,"open_postings":4,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":1,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-10-29T05:49:05Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"lead","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Palo Alto, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":400000,"max":550000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":550000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":true,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Multimodal AI","optional":false},{"name":"Speech Recognition","optional":false},{"name":"Text-to-Speech","optional":false},{"name":"Tokenization","optional":false},{"name":"Voice Agents","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-06-29T18:24:22Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-08-06","last_verified_at":"2026-10-29T10:22:42Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":121,"trust":{"level":"stale","repost_count":0,"flags":["stale"],"days_open":121},"description":"About Inflection AI\nInflection AI is a Public Benefit Corporation empowering people with human-centered, emotionally intelligent AI. We’re shaping the future of AI by combining emotional intelligence (EQ) and raw intelligence (IQ) to elevate people’s potential.\nInflection AI created Pi, the world’s first emotionally intelligent AI, to help people work through decisions, emotions, and challenges. Pi is a personal AI agent powered by Inflection AI’s foundation model, proving that AI can be personal, empathetic, and contextually aware.\nAbout the Role\nVoice is becoming the highest-stakes interface for AI, where quality depends on speed, naturalness, interruption handling, emotional nuance, and reliability in real-world conditions. We are looking for a hands-on technical leader to define and build Inflection’s realtime Voice AI stack across speech models, streaming systems, voice-agent runtime, and evaluation. This person will help shape how emotionally intelligent AI shows up in spoken interactions, partnering across research, engineering, product, and design to deliver voice agents that feel responsive, trustworthy, and useful in enterprise settings.\nWhat You’ll Do\nEstablish the technical roadmap for Inflection's realtime Voice AI stack, encompassing streaming ASR, TTS, speech-to-speech, speech LLMs, turn-taking, barge-in, latency, and reliability.\nUtilize a 1,000 GPU cluster to support performance benchmarking and extensive experimentation.\nDetermine build-vs-buy-vs-train strategies for core audio, speech, and realtime interaction components.\nDirect research and engineering efforts focused on speech quality, naturalness, expressiveness, emotional fit, controllability, and production readiness.\nCollaborate with infrastructure, product, design, and agentic AI teams to deploy voice agents for enterprise workflows.\nDevelop evaluation systems measuring voice quality through metrics such as clarity, emotional appropriateness, interruption handling, task success, user preference, latency, and reliability, moving beyond standard WER.\nRefine production voice behavior by debugging across runtime, model, evaluation, data, and product layers.\nMentor, and Coach a team specializing in speech research, audio infrastructure, realtime systems, and evaluation.\n\nWhat We’re Looking For\nExperience leading or serving as a principal Research and Engineering contributor to realtime voice, speech, audio AI, or conversational AI systems in production.\nExperience with one or more of: streaming ASR, TTS, speech-to-speech systems, speech LLMs, audio tokenization, multimodal models, barge-in, low-latency inference, or realtime agents.\nStrong technical judgment across both speech modeling and production systems.\nAbility to define voice quality in terms of user and customer outcomes, not only offline model metrics.\nExperience designing or using evaluation systems that capture real user experience.\nStrong product intuition for natural, trustworthy, emotionally appropriate voice interactions.\nAbility to lead senior technical talent while staying close to the code, architecture, and debugging work.\nHave a bachelor’s degree or equivalent in a related field to the offered position requirements\nEmployee Pay Disclosures\nAt Inflection AI, we aim to attract and retain the best employees and compensate them in a way that appropriately and fairly values their individual contributions to the company. For this role, Inflection AI estimates a starting annual base salary to fall within the range of $400,000 to $550,000, depending on a candidate’s qualifications and level of experience. This role also includes a meaningful equity component, allowing employees to share in the long-term success of the company.\nBenefits\nInflection AI values and supports our team’s mental, emotional, financial and physical health. We are focused on building a positive, safe, inclusive and inspiring place to work. Our benefits include: \nRobust medical, dental and vision options with employer contributions for HSA, FSA and DFSA\n401k matching program \nFlexible Time Off, 10 paid holidays, 5 days sick leave\nParental, Medical and Family care leave \nGenerous cell-phone, wellness and office set up stipends \nSupport of country-specific visa needs for international employees living in the Bay Area","description_format":"text","description_chars":4297,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["401k plan","Equity","Flexible time off"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["LLM & Generative AI","Conversational AI"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-06-29T18:24:22Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"US","licensed_sponsor":true,"evidence":"H-1B filings in 12 months: 4","filings_12m":4,"filings_prev_12m":2,"green_card_filings_12m":0,"median_offered_wage_usd":247500,"route":null,"cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-10-15T11:24:14+00:00","sources":["US Department of Labor: LCA disclosure data (H-1B, H-1B1, E-3)"],"filings_for_role_12m":4}],"liveness":{"score":9,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.31,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":121,"expected_fill_days":30,"reasons":["conf:3","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-10-29T05:49:05Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":550000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/inflection-principal-research-engineering-realtime-voice-ai","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/inflection-principal-research-engineering-realtime-voice-ai.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-29T14:34:20Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":22006,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-30T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":31705},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=31705"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Finflection-principal-research-engineering-realtime-voice-ai"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Finflection-principal-research-engineering-realtime-voice-ai"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Finflection-principal-research-engineering-realtime-voice-ai"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/inflection-principal-research-engineering-realtime-voice-ai\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Finflection-principal-research-engineering-realtime-voice-ai"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":69733}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"inflection.ai","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":69733},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. 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