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AssemblyAISenior Research Engineer
AssemblyAI is hiring a Senior Research Engineer to join its Research team and help build the systems powering large-scale distributed training, data processing, and inference for…
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About This Role
AssemblyAI is hiring a Senior Research Engineer to join its Research team and help build the systems powering large-scale distributed training, data processing, and inference for voice artificial intelligence models. Operating as a lean and capital-efficient organization, the company processes millions of audio hours daily and provides API capabilities to thousands of customers. This position is ideal for an engineer who wants to work directly within the pipeline, accelerating experimental…
Job Description
AssemblyAI is hiring a Senior Research Engineer to join its Research team and help build the systems powering large-scale distributed training, data processing, and inference for voice artificial intelligence models. Operating as a lean and capital-efficient organization, the company processes millions of audio hours daily and provides API capabilities to thousands of customers. This position is ideal for an engineer who wants to work directly within the pipeline, accelerating experimental velocity, optimizing TPU and JAX workflows, and tackling complex performance bottlenecks across the entire stack. In this cross-functional role, the professional will collaborate closely with researchers, infrastructure specialists, and production engineers to refine model architectures, develop evaluation harnesses, and enhance production inference systems for speech language models. The environment emphasizes a meritocratic culture, rapid execution, and substantial individual ownership without bureaucratic layers.
Responsibilities
- Accelerate the team's experimental velocity by making it faster to launch jobs, collect trusted measurements, and determine next steps
- Maintain and evolve the JAX training framework to keep large-scale distributed training runs scalable and efficient on TPUs
- Investigate quality issues in training data, build surfacing tools, and translate findings into measurable accuracy improvements
- Analyze production model accuracy, construct evaluation harnesses, and identify the most impactful customer enhancements
- Transition research prototypes into production-ready systems by modernizing and refactoring architectures and infrastructure
- Optimize production inference for speech language models using serving architecture design, quantization, and speculative decoding
- Detect and fix performance bottlenecks across the stack, ranging from high-level system design to low-level XLA and Pallas kernels
- Partner with research, infrastructure, and production engineering teams to trace problems to their root causes and implement reliable fixes
Requirements
- Expert proficiency with JAX, TPUs, and the surrounding ecosystem including Flax, Optax, and the XLA compilation pipeline
- Demonstrated measurement discipline with a focus on defining success prior to starting and critically evaluating results
- Broad engagement across the pipeline, from low-level TPU performance to data quality and evaluation blind spots
- Experience optimizing inference systems for production environments, ideally working with large language models or speech models
- Deep understanding of modern deep learning systems, machine learning infrastructure best practices, and large-scale distributed training
- Familiarity with inference optimization techniques such as continuous batching, sharding strategies, KV-cache management, and quantization
- Strong Python programming skills and enthusiasm for refactoring and improving existing codebases
- Strong communication and collaboration skills for explaining technical tradeoffs and prioritizing impactful work
Qualifications
- Experience with C++ or Rust for kernel-level work
- Domain knowledge in Speech-to-Text covering Automatic Speech Recognition architectures, audio processing, and streaming inference
Core Skills
Benefits
- Competitive salary structured for the company size, stage, and industry
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the employment type for the Senior Research Engineer role?
The posting specifies the employment type as full-time.
Where is the job located and is it remote?
The specific location is not stated in the source posting, but the company headquarters is listed as remote.
What is the salary range for this position?
The expected US salary range is between $270,000 and $310,000, though exact compensation depends on experience, skill level, and internal equity.
What core technical skills are required?
Applicants need expert-level proficiency with JAX and TPUs, experience optimizing production inference systems, and a strong background in distributed training and Python.
Sample Interview Questions
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