Applied Research Scientist - Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)

Salient is one of the fastest-growing AI startups in consumer finance. In less than two years, we’ve achieved product-market fit, scaled to 8-figure ARR, and emerged as one of the undisputed leaders in financial voice AI.

A few fast facts:

• Backed by YC and raised the largest Series A for a B2B startup from a16z

• Reached product-market fit in <2 years and scaled to 8-digit ARR

• 19-person team building a speech AI agent that handles millions of real customer calls per day, and fully deployed in production across major financial institutions (not just PoCs)

• We’re on a mission to pass the Turing test for conversational speech in a telephony setting

• 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 (e.g., 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.