Applied Research Scientist - Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)

Salient is pioneering voice AI solutions to transform consumer loan servicing and compliance. Our initial focus: the $1.5T U.S. auto lending market. In under two years since our launch Salient has seen rapid market growth, including:

• Scaling to more than $10M in ARR

• Partnering with some of the largest consumer lenders in America

• Cash flow positive

• Raising $65m in funding from top-tier venture capital investors

• Interfacing with more than 2 million unique US consumers

• Processing over $150M in cash transactions

• Preventing $30M in fraud and 35k+ CFPB violations

• In-person office culture in San Francisco, CA

About the Role

We are looking for Applied Research Scientists with deep expertise in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) to join our team. You will work on designing, training, and evaluating next-generation ASR and speech-augmented language models, with a focus on high accuracy, robustness in noisy conditions, and Real Time performance. This role is ideal for someone who thrives at the intersection of cutting-edge research and production-grade systems.

Responsibilities

• Develop and improve SOTA ASR models and speech-augmented language models (SALM)

• Optimize ASR systems for diverse accents/languages and low-resource speech

• Contribute to internal tooling for data processing, model training, and inference benchmarking

• Perform any relevant engineering tasks related to model training and serving (eg, data ingestion, data cleaning, evaluation)

Requirements

• Proven track record developing SOTA ASR models, or a PhD focused on ASR or speech-augmented language models

• Strong understanding of audio preprocessing, tokenization, and decoding techniques

• Experience with large-scale training pipelines and distributed training frameworks

• Ability to work 4 days a week from our San Francisco office (open to candidates willing to relocate)

Nice to Have

• Experience with multilingual or low-resource ASR systems

• Contributions to academic research or open-source projects in speech

• Background in speech synthesis, speaker diarization, or conversational speech modeling

As an early-stage company building at the frontier of AI, we work with high intensity and commitment. While schedules can vary by role/team, many weeks will demand extra focus, flexibility and time particularly during major launches and high impact sprints. We're seeking those who are aligned to and able to commit to that expectation which includes 4 days per week in our San Francisco Office.