Applied Researcher, Audio Understanding
Department: Research
Location: *HQ - San Francisco, CA
Compensation: $200K – $350K • Offers Equity
Employment Type: FullTime
About Cartesia
Our mission is to build the next generation of AI: ubiquitous, interactive intelligence that runs wherever you are. Today, not even the best models can continuously process and reason over a year-long stream of audio, video and text—1B text tokens, 10B audio tokens and 1T video tokens—let alone do this on-device.
We're pioneering the model architectures that will make this possible. Our founding team met as PhDs at the Stanford AI Lab, where we invented State Space Models or SSMs, a new primitive for training efficient, large-scale foundation models. Our team combines deep expertise in model innovation and systems engineering paired with a design-minded product engineering team to build and ship cutting edge models and experiences.
We're funded by leading investors at Index Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners, along with Factory, Conviction, A Star, General Catalyst, SV Angel, Databricks and others. We're fortunate to have the support of many amazing advisors, and 90+ angels across many industries, including the world's foremost experts in AI.
The Role
As a Senior Applied Researcher in Audio Understanding, you will be responsible for tackling the most challenging problems in audio perception. Your work will go beyond traditional speech recognition to encompass the full spectrum of audio perception, from identifying speakers and interpreting emotion to understanding complex acoustic environments. You will lead high-impact projects that are critical to our mission of building truly aware AI.
What you’ll do
Architect and develop novel, large-scale models for complex audio understanding tasks, including multi-speaker ASR, diarization, and non-speech audio classification and deploy them to production at scale.
Pioneer research in areas like self-supervised learning for audio, few-shot learning, and robust audio-visual perception.
Set new standards for how we evaluate and benchmark our audio understanding systems.
Build large scale pre-training and fine-tuning datasets for audio understanding capabilities.
What we’re looking for
Deep expertise in ASR, audio understanding, language modeling, or generative modeling more broadly.
Experience with large-scale training, GPU/TPU acceleration, and model optimization.
Strong applied mindset—able to balance scientific novelty with product impact.
Our perks
🍽 Lunch, dinner and snacks at the office.
🏥 Fully covered medical, dental, and vision insurance for employees.
🏦 401(k).
✈️ Relocation and immigration support.
🦖 Your own personal Yoshi.
Our Culture
🏢 We’re an in-person team based out of San Francisco. We love being in the office, hanging out together, and learning from each other every day.
🚢 We ship fast. All of our work is novel and cutting edge, and execution speed is paramount. We have a high bar, and we don’t sacrifice quality or design along the way.
🤝 We support each other. We have an open & inclusive culture that’s focused on giving everyone the resources they need to succeed.
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