SoundHound AI believes every person should be able to interact naturally with the products around them–by simply talking. With a global reach spanning two dozen languages, we build Voice AI products with conversational intelligence for cars, restaurant ordering, retail businesses, and more, allowing our customers to extend their brand in new and meaningful ways.
SoundHound’s Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) team is currently developing and starting to roll out a state-of-the-art speech recognition system and model architecture improve accuracy, reduce complexity and cost, and enable new dynamic features to make the system more scalable and easily customized. This project (known as Polaris) requires many cross-functional disciplines and close collaboration to be successful. Our team (ASR Systems) is responsible for the most intensive software engineering tasks relating to developing Polaris and supporting our existing speech recognition system in production. This particular role is for our Inference Squad, which is a highly specialized group primarily responsible for high-performance inference and model integration. Members of the Inference Squad provide the necessary expertise to ensure alignment between the systems-focused engineers and the ASR Modeling team who focus on research and model development.
In this role, you will:
- Enhance the core of our proprietary inference server (Snowcat) to support Polaris rollout and integration with various products
- Help support our existing production ASR system until we successfully replace everything with Polaris, including targeted enhancements, incident investigations, and technical analysis as needed
We would love to hear from you if:
Required:
- You have excellent general software engineering skills and discipline
- You have professional experience with both C++ and Python for complex systems
- You have exceptional attention to detail when solving hard technical problems, including design, refactoring, optimization, and debugging
- You are thoughtful in decision making, especially in understanding business priorities, balancing trade-offs, and managing ambiguities
- You have advanced expertise with algorithms and data structures
Nice-to-Have:
- You have a strong math background (e.g. digital signal processing, machine learning, control theory, geometry, or probability theory)
- You have expertise with low-level C++ concepts such as memory management and bit-level arithmetic
- You have a deep understanding of programming with tensor math libraries (e.g. NumPy, PyTorch, Eigen)
- You are familiar with CUDA programming and GPU architecture
- You have an understanding of advanced indexing used in tensor math libraries
- You have experience with TorchScript
- You have experience with finite state transducers, abstract syntax trees, hidden Markov models, and beam search
We’d be especially excited if:
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You have specific experience with speech recognition or general interest in linguistics.
This role is available throughout Canada. Employees within a 100-kilometer radius of our Toronto office are expected to work from the office on three pre-scheduled “core days” each month to encourage cross-team connection and in-person collaboration. Aside from these office-specific “core days,” this job allows for virtual/remote, hybrid, and in-office workplace setting options. In addition to salary and equity, you will receive comprehensive healthcare, paid time off, and other benefits. Our recruiting team will provide a specific salary range based on location and years of experience.
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SoundHound AI strives to be a values-driven company that is supportive of one another, open and honest, undaunted by challenges, nimble and focused, and determined to excel and win. Diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging are key to who we are as a company. With a mission to build Voice AI for the world, creating a team with global perspectives is critical to our success. Learn more about our philosophy, benefits, and culture at https://www.soundhound.com/careers.
We care deeply about fostering an environment where everyone is supported and can do their best work. SoundHound ensures that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodations to participate in the interview process, perform essential job functions, and receive other employment benefits.
To view our job applicant privacy policy, please visit https://static.soundhound.com/corpus/ta/applicantprivacynotice.html.
Come join our growing team and bring your unique voice to our mission!
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What We Do
At SoundHound Inc., we believe every brand should have a voice. As the leading innovator of conversational technologies, we’re trusted by top brands around the globe. Houndify, our independent Voice AI platform, with 70,000+ users, allows brands to create custom voice assistants that deliver results with unprecedented speed and accuracy.
Our mission is to enable humans to interact with the things around them in the same way we interact with each other: by speaking naturally. We’re making that a reality through our SoundHound music discovery app and Hound voice assistant and through our strategic partnerships with brands like Mercedes-Benz, Hyundai, Deutsche Telekom, and Pandora. Today, our customized voice AI solutions allow people to talk to phones, cars, smart speakers, mobile apps, coffee machines, and every other part of the emerging ‘voice-first’ world.
Our diverse team of engineers, UX/UI designers, writers, data scientists and linguists are all passionate about creating a world with more conversations. With more than 14 years of expertise in voice technology, we have hundreds of millions of end users, and a worldwide team in six countries building solutions for a voice-first world.
