ML Research Engineer, Speech

Department: Engineering

Location: San Francisco

Employment Type: FullTime

Company Overview

Echo Neurotechnologies is an exciting new startup in the Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) space, driving innovation through advanced hardware engineering and AI solutions. Our mission is to deliver cutting-edge technologies that restore autonomy to people living with disabilities and improve their quality of life.

Team Culture

Join a small, dedicated team of knowledgeable and motivated professionals. Our early-stage environment offers the opportunity to take ownership of broad decisions with significant and long-lasting impact. We emphasize continuous learning and growth, fostering cross-functional collaboration where your contributions are vital to our success.

Job Summary

We are seeking an experienced ML Research Engineer, with a focus on speech modeling, to join our team. The person who fills this role will apply ML/AI principles and practices to designing and developing flexible models of speech for use within brain-computer interface applications to have real-world impact on patients with severe disabilities. They will need to have extensive experience with speech modeling & feature engineering, time-series analysis, and building custom ML models from scratch.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and assess varying model architectures and modeling strategies to maximize the accuracy and robustness of models for decoding speech from brain activity

• Explore the use of state-of-the-art speech features and representations within neural-decoding pipelines, informed by the fields of speech science and functional neurophysiology

• Develop pipelines for synthesizing personalizable and naturalistic speech from text and from brain activity

• Build algorithms to analyze intact and impaired speech signals to detect biomarkers related to underlying diseases and disabilities

• Work collaboratively within a small team to develop models, design R&D workflows, and translate scientific findings into product implementations

• Contribute to best practices for reliability, observability, reproducibility, and scientific rigor across the R&D ecosystem

• Maintain versioned, clear, and highly documented code, analysis pipelines, and results for maximum interpretability and reproducibility

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Math, Engineering, Neuroscience, or other relevant field

• A minimum of 2 years of academic or industry research experience working with speech datasets

• Experience performing feature engineering with speech signals

• Proficiency in Python and PyTorch

• Excellent communication and collaboration skills to work effectively on cross-functional and interdisciplinary teams

• Experience having technical ownership over at least one successfully implemented collaborative project

Preferred Qualifications

• A PhD in Math, Engineering, Neuroscience, or other relevant field

• Experience developing speech synthesizers

• Experience working with neural signals, especially for brain-computer interface applications

What We Offer

• An opportunity to work on exciting, cutting-edge projects to transform patients’ lives in a highly collaborative work environment.

• Competitive compensation, including stock options.

• Comprehensive benefits package.

• 401(k) program with matching contributions.

Equal Opportunity Employer

Echo Neurotechnologies is an Equal Opportunity Employer (EOE). We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.

Confidentiality

All applications will be treated confidentially. Applicants may be asked to sign an NDA after the initial stages of the interview process.