AI/ML Developer (Speech AI)

Company Background

Our client is a technology startup building advanced voice automation solutions for the quick-service restaurant industry. The company develops a privacy-conscious, high-performance drive-thru voice assistant that automates real-time customer interactions, improves order accuracy, and helps restaurant chains increase revenue and operational efficiency. Its product is designed for fast deployment in noisy, high-volume drive-thru environments and is already gaining market traction through cooperation with a major restaurant chain.

Project Description

The project is a next-generation voice automation engine for drive-thru order-taking in quick-service restaurants. It enables fully automated, real-time conversations between customers and the restaurant ordering system using modern speech recognition, natural language processing, and text-to-speech technologies.

The engineer will work on improving the core voice and audio capabilities of the platform, including Speech-to-Text, Text-to-Speech, noise cancellation, speech enhancement, and real-time audio pipelines. The main focus will be on reducing latency, improving recognition quality and speech clarity, and making the system robust in extremely noisy real-world environments such as drive-thrus.

Technologies

• Speech-to-Text, Text-to-Speech


• Audio Engineering / DSP


• Noise Suppression, Voice Activity Detection, Signal Processing


• PyTorch / TensorFlow


• Real-Time Inference, Streaming Pipelines


• GPU Optimization, Edge Inference


• Production ML Systems

What You'll Do

• Optimize low-latency, real-time Speech-to-Text pipelines for production drive-thru environments;


• Improve Text-to-Speech naturalness, responsiveness, and overall conversational quality;


• Design, tune, and improve noise suppression, echo cancellation, and speech enhancement systems;


• Improve speech recognition accuracy and robustness under challenging acoustic conditions, including engine noise, weather, overlapping speech, poor microphone quality, and outdoor environments;


• Build and scale audio processing infrastructure for production deployments;


• Evaluate, benchmark, and compare speech models using real-world audio data and production scenarios;


• Experiment with modern Speech AI technologies, models, and architectures to improve system performance;


• Collaborate with LLM and conversational AI teams to improve end-to-end voice interaction quality;

Job Requirements

• Advanced Python development skills;


• Deep hands-on expertise with Speech-to-Text and Text-to-Speech systems;


• Proven experience improving speech recognition quality in noisy or otherwise challenging acoustic environments;


• Strong expertise in noise suppression, echo cancellation, voice activity detection, and speech enhancement;


• Strong understanding of real-time and streaming audio architectures, including conversational voice pipelines and real-time inference;


• Experience building low-latency, production-grade AI systems;


• Experience with modern speech AI frameworks, models, and APIs;


• Experience deploying and scaling AI services in cloud environments;


• Ability to troubleshoot complex audio quality, latency, and reliability issues;


• Product-oriented mindset with a focus on real-world performance, customer experience, and high ownership;


• Ability to collaborate effectively with engineering, LLM, and conversational AI teams;


• English level: B2 or higher;

What Do We Offer

The global benefits package includes:

• Technical and non-technical training for professional and personal growth;


• Internal conferences and meetups to learn from industry experts;


• Support and mentorship from an experienced employee to help you professional grow and development;


• Health insurance;


• English courses;


• Sports activities to promote a healthy lifestyle;


• Flexible work options, including remote and hybrid opportunities;


• Referral program for bringing in new talent;


• Work anniversary program and additional vacation days.