Senior Research Engineer at AssemblyAI

Job Title: Senior Research Engineer (Research Team)

Company: AssemblyAI, a Voice AI company whose speech models handle 1M+ hours of audio daily for thousands of customers.

Job Type: Full-time

Location: Remote, anywhere in the world

Salary/Pay: $270,000 to $310,000 

Experience: Senior level.

Skills Required:
Expert-level JAX and TPUs, including Flax, Optax and the XLA compilation pipeline
Strong experience optimizing production inference systems, ideally for LLMs or speech models
Deep understanding of large-scale distributed training and ML infrastructure best practices
Familiarity with inference optimization techniques: continuous batching, KV-cache management, sharding and quantization
Strong Python skills
Measurement discipline: defining success upfront and staying skeptical of your own results
Excellent communication and a collaborative mindset
Bonus: C++ or Rust experience for kernel-level work; domain knowledge in speech-to-text (ASR architectures, audio processing, streaming inference).

Application Deadline: November 3, 2026

Description:
AssemblyAI is hiring a Senior Research Engineer to improve the systems behind its large-scale distributed training, data processing and inference. The main goal is to speed up how quickly the team can run an experiment, measure it and learn from it.

You will:
• Maintain and evolve the JAX training framework on TPU
• Improve training data quality and build evaluation harnesses
• Optimize production inference for speech language models (quantization, speculative decoding)
• Resolve performance bottlenecks from low-level kernels (XLA, Pallas) to system design
• Turn research prototypes into production-ready systems

The role is cross-functional, working with researchers, infrastructure and production engineering. AssemblyAI is a lean team of under 100 people and describes its culture as a meritocracy with minimal bureaucracy.

How to Apply: Apply through We Work Remotely.