Audio Systems Engineer in London

A unique opportunity for an Audio Systems Engineer to join a very early-stage London technology company building a next-generation edge device product currently in stealth. Founded in 2024 by an exceptionally experienced team of product designers and engineers, several of whom have previously built and exited companies for significant sums, this is a genuine ground-floor opportunity to shape a product from first principles.

This is a small, high-calibre team spanning hardware, embedded systems, software and machine learning. They are building something ambitious, technically complex and product-led, with audio forming a central pillar of the roadmap.

Salary: £55,000 to £70,000 per annum + equity + benefits. £55,000 is realistic for someone straight from PhD level with strong relevant foundations.

Location: Central London, 4 days per week onsite.

Requirements for Audio Systems Engineer:

• Strong academic or commercial experience in audio DSP and signal processing
• PhD in Audio Engineering, Signal Processing, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science or similar, or MSc with strong relevant experience
• Top academics throughout – including a 2.1 or 1st degree and at least ABB at A Level
• Strong programming skills in C or C++ with experience working in real-time or low-latency environments
• Practical Python experience for analysis, benchmarking and evaluation tooling
• Experience shipping embedded audio systems or major audio subsystems into production, either commercially or through advanced research
• Strong fundamentals in DSP blocks such as filtering, AGC, DRC, noise suppression, VAD or echo control
• Ability to operate effectively in a fast-paced startup environment
• Strong communication skills and ability to collaborate across hardware, embedded and ML or cloud engineers
• Willingness to work onsite in Central London 4 days per week

Experience in the following would be beneficial:

• Audio codecs and streaming pipelines such as Opus, AAC, RTP or WebRTC-style systems
• Hardware-adjacent experience such as I2S, ADC or DAC, DMA, SPI, I2C or UART
• Experience using oscilloscopes or logic analysers
• Audio measurement techniques and designing repeatable evaluation methodologies
• Always-on or low-power audio detection systems
• Familiarity with ML frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow
• Experience with GStreamer, WebRTC audio processing, SpeexDSP, RNNoise or similar

Responsibilities for Audio Systems Engineer:

• Design, implement and tune a robust end-to-end audio pipeline from real-time capture on-device through to cloud-based processing
• Deliver reliable performance in noisy, unpredictable real-world environments
• Implement and optimise DSP components under tight compute and power constraints
• Define objective performance metrics and build repeatable evaluation and regression testing harnesses
• Debug audio issues across the full stack using instrumentation, profiling and lab equipment where required
• Work closely with ML and cloud engineers to enable audio-driven intelligence via offline and online pipelines
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to balance quality, latency, compute, power and system complexity
• Contribute to engineering best practice, documentation and design discussions as the team scales

What the role offers:

• A genuine greenfield opportunity within a stealth product
• High ownership and influence over the audio subsystem from day one
• Close collaboration with an experienced founding team
• Equity alongside salary
• The opportunity to build intelligent audio systems that unlock richer data insight than video analytics alone

Applications:

If you would like to apply for this unique Audio Systems Engineering role then please send your CV via the relevant links. We are committed to creating an inclusive and accessible recruitment process. If you require reasonable adjustments for your application, for example due to a disability, please highlight this by separately emailing.