Senior Staff Research Scientist | Voice

DeepL is a global AI product and research company focused on building secure, intelligent solutions to complex business problems. Over 200,000 business customers and millions of individuals across 228 global markets today trust DeepL's Language AI platform for human-like translation, improved writing and real-time voice translation. Our goal is to become the global leader in trusted, intelligent AI technology, building products that drive better communication, foster connections, and create a meaningful impact.

What sets us apart is our blend of cutting-edge AI technology, meaningful work, and a culture where people truly thrive. We’re a team of innovators, researchers, and creators driven by a shared purpose to unlock human potential by making work simpler, smarter, and more connected.

DeepL Voice is defining the future of real-time multilingual communication. Built on the foundation of DeepL’s world-leading translation quality, the Voice Track brings together cross-functional teams across Research, Engineering, and Product to push the boundaries of what is possible in speech-to-speech interpretation. We are now scaling up our research efforts to invent the next generation of audio, speech, and multimodal translation technologies.

We’re looking for a Senior Staff Research Scientist to lead scientific innovation across our speech and translation models. This is a high-impact, hands-on role for a research leader who can define long-term scientific strategy, prototype rapidly, run large-scale experiments, and drive breakthroughs all the way into production. You will work across ASR, MT, TTS, streaming inference, and large speech models—leading both cascaded and emerging end-to-end internationalized speech-translation approaches.

Your responsibilities:

• Lead hands-on research and development across ASR, MT, TTS, and speech-to-speech translation for real-time voice products.
• Design, train, and optimize large-scale ASR models for multilingual accuracy, robustness, and ultra-low-latency streaming.
• Improve cascaded translation pipelines end to end: segmentation, ASR to MT interfaces, streaming MT inference, and incremental decoding.
• Develop and refine real-time TTS models with natural prosody, stable speaker characteristics, and fast inference.
• Build and experiment with end-to-end and LLM-based speech-to-speech translation systems, including streaming and one-shot approaches.
• Own the full lifecycle of model delivery: prototyping, ablations, training, evaluation, optimization, and production deployment.
• Work closely with engineering teams to integrate models into real-time systems, ensuring reliability, uptime, and quality at scale.
• Drive improvements in inference efficiency, model serving, voice UX, and robustness to real-world acoustic conditions.
• Establish strong practices for evaluation, reproducibility, monitoring, and continuous model improvement in production.
• Mentor researchers and engineers, promote hands-on collaboration, and raise the bar for model quality and operational excellence.

What we’re looking for:

• Deep expertise in speech, audio, or multilingual ML, particularly in ASR, MT, TTS, end-to-end ST, or large speech models.
• A hands-on builder who enjoys training models, running experiments, debugging pipelines, and integrating ML systems into production.
• Strong understanding of real-time streaming constraints and how to design models that operate reliably at low latency.
• Experience shipping ML models to production, maintaining them at scale, and working with engineers on deployment, monitoring, and serving.
• Ability to lead complex research efforts while staying grounded in product impact, user experience, and real-world performance.
• Strong coding and experimentation skills (Python, PyTorch/JAX, audio processing libraries).
• Ability to communicate clearly, collaborate across teams, and align research work with product and engineering priorities.
• Proven experience mentoring others and elevating technical quality across a fast-moving, applied research team.

We are an equal opportunity employer. You are welcome at DeepL for who you are - we appreciate authenticity here. Our product is for everyone, and so is our workplace. The more voices we have represented and amplified in our business, the more we will all succeed, contribute, and think forward!