About the Role
We are seeking a highly experienced Senior Data Scientist to lead the research, development, and scaling of our next-generation conversational AI and multimodal systems. In this role, you will focus on Speech Processing. You will own the end-to-end lifecycle of our core models — from designing massive data pipelines and human-in-the-loop labelling systems, to training, fine-tuning, and deploying state-of-the-art Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)
models.
Key Responsibilities
- Speech technology (ASR): Build, train, and optimise custom ASR models for high-accuracy transcription in noisy environments.
- Data processing and labelling pipelines: Architect scalable data pipelines for ingesting, cleaning, and processing large volumes of unstructured audio and text data. Design strict quality assurance rubrics and manage human-in-the-loop labelling workflows to ensure high-fidelity training datasets.
- End-to-end model lifecycle: Lead the full iterative lifecycle, including data curation, baseline modelling, hyperparameter optimisation, evaluation, and production inference optimisation using techniques such as quantisation, distillation, and TensorRT.
- Architectural leadership: Evaluate emerging architectures, research papers, and open-source models. Make strategic decisions on when to build custom models from scratch versus fine-tuning existing foundational models.
- Cross-functional collaboration: Partner with ML Engineers, Backend Developers, and Product Managers to integrate models into user-facing applications with stringent latency and throughput requirements.
- Mentorship: Guide and mentor junior data scientists and engineers, fostering a culture of rigorous scientific experimentation and robust engineering practices.
Required Qualifications
- Education: Master’s or Ph.D. in Speech Science, Artificial Intelligence, Computational Linguistics, Mathematics, or a highly related quantitative field.
- Experience: 5+ years of industry experience in Machine Learning, Deep Learning, or Data Science, with at least 2 years specifically focused on Generative AI, NLP, or Speech domains.
- Speech processing: Deep theoretical and practical understanding of acoustic modelling, ASR architectures such as Whisper, Conformer, wav2vec, Nemotron
- Data engineering for AI: Extensive experience designing data curation strategies, managing data annotation projects, and using tools for audio processing and text normalisation.
- Programming and frameworks: Expert-level proficiency in Python and PyTorch.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience deploying models on edge devices or optimising ML models for low-compute environments.
- Published research in tier-1 conferences such as ACL, Interspeech, ICASSP, or NeurIPS.
- Experience with multimodal model architectures, including audio-text native models.
- Familiarity with cloud ML ecosystems such as AWS SageMaker, GCP Vertex AI, or Azure ML.
Senior Data Scientist in London employer: Connect
Join a forward-thinking company that values innovation and collaboration, where as a Senior Machine Learning Engineer, you will have the opportunity to work on cutting-edge Conversational AI and Data Analytics platforms. Our dynamic work culture fosters continuous learning and growth, providing you with access to the latest technologies and professional development opportunities. Located in a vibrant tech hub, we offer a supportive environment that encourages creativity and teamwork, making it an ideal place for those seeking meaningful and rewarding employment.
