[Remote] AI Research Engineer- Speech 1

Centific is seeking an AI Research Engineer specializing in Speech/Audio to develop Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) and Speech-to-Speech (S2S) systems. The role involves designing LALMs, audio reasoning models, alignment mechanisms, efficient tokenization, and comprehensive evaluation frameworks, with a focus on low-latency streaming and production deployment.

• Design, develop, and deploy Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) capable of native audio understanding, reasoning, and generation
• Build Large Audio Reasoning Models that perform complex chain-of-thought reasoning over speech and audio inputs, including medical, technical, and conversational domains
• Contribute to Speech-to-Speech (S2S) system development, including speech understanding, dialogue management, and speech synthesis components
• Research and implement alignment mechanisms between speech encoders and LLM backbones using lightweight adapters, LoRA, and efficient fine-tuning strategies
• Design efficient speech tokenization and temporal compression techniques suitable for long-form audio reasoning and multi-turn spoken dialogue
• Build comprehensive evaluation frameworks for audio reasoning capabilities, including benchmarks for speech QA, audio understanding, and reasoning accuracy
• Optimize inference pipelines for low-latency, streaming applications in speech systems
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to transfer research innovations into production systems and customer-facing applications