Senior Staff Research Scientist | Voice

DeepL Voice is defining the future of real-time multilingual communication. Built on the foundation of DeepL’s world-leading translation quality, the Voice Track brings together cross-functional teams across Research, Engineering, and Product to push the boundaries of what is possible in speech-to-speech interpretation. We’re looking for a Senior Staff Research Scientist to lead scientific innovation across our speech and translation models. This is a high-impact, hands-on role for a research leader who can define long-term scientific strategy, prototype rapidly, run large-scale experiments, and drive breakthroughs all the way into production.

Responsibilities

Lead hands-on research and development across ASR, MT, TTS, and speech-to-speech translation for real-time voice products; Design, train, and optimize large-scale ASR models for multilingual accuracy, robustness, and ultra-low-latency streaming; Improve cascaded translation pipelines end to end: segmentation, ASR→MT interfaces, streaming MT inference, and incremental decoding; Develop and refine real-time TTS models with natural prosody, stable speaker characteristics, and fast inference; Build and experiment with end-to-end and LLM-based speech-to-speech translation systems, including streaming and one-shot approaches; Own the full lifecycle of model delivery: prototyping, ablations, training, evaluation, optimization, and production deployment; Work closely with engineering teams to integrate models into real-time systems, ensuring reliability, uptime, and quality at scale; Drive improvements in inference efficiency, model serving, voice UX, and robustness to real-world acoustic conditions; Establish strong practices for evaluation, reproducibility, monitoring, and continuous model improvement in production; Mentor researchers and engineers, promote hands-on collaboration, and raise the bar for model quality and operational excellence.

Requirements

Deep expertise in speech, audio, or multilingual ML, particularly in ASR, MT, TTS, end-to-end ST, or large speech models; A hands-on builder who enjoys training models, running experiments, debugging pipelines, and integrating ML systems into production; Strong understanding of real-time streaming constraints and how to design models that operate reliably at low latency; Experience shipping ML models to production, maintaining them at scale, and working with engineers on deployment, monitoring, and serving; Ability to lead complex research efforts while staying grounded in product impact, user experience, and real-world performance; Strong coding and experimentation skills (Python, PyTorch/JAX, audio processing libraries); Ability to communicate clearly, collaborate across teams, and align research work with product and engineering priorities; Proven experience mentoring others and elevating technical quality across a fast-moving, applied research team.