Head of Machine Learning

Department: ML & Data

Location: San Francisco

Compensation: $300K – $400K • Offers Equity

Employment Type: FullTime

About Wispr

Wispr Flow is making it as effortless to interact with your devices as talking to a close friend.

Today, Wispr Flow is the first voice dictation platform people use more than their keyboards — because it understands you perfectly on the first try. It’s context-aware, personalized, and works anywhere you can type, on desktop or phone.

In 2026, in addition to dictation, we're focused on building native actions — an agentic framework that understands you, and works reliably.

We’re a team of AI researchers, designers, growth experts, and engineers rethinking human-computer interaction from the ground up. We value high-agency teammates who communicate openly, obsess over users, and sweat the details. We thrive on spirited debate, truth-seeking, and real-world impact.

We're grown our revenue +150% every quarter for the last 4 quarters, and have raised $81M from Tier 1 VC firms and other well-known angels.

About the Role

As a Head of ML at Wispr, you'll lead the ML research and engineering teams for development of our next generation speech recognition and voice-to-action models. We are training our next generation of multimodal speech-LLMs to perform contextual speech recognition: using auxiliary signals such as speaker history, current screen context, and more to break the current performance boundary of ASR models. In addition, you'll spearhead work on RL-based personalization of LLMs for post-processing and interpreting user speech.

You will be responsible for technically leading the direction of the ML team, being directly hands on involved in aspects of training and serving of our models, and for hiring and growing the team.

See here for specific descriptions of the research problems and approaches at Wispr: https://wisprflow.ai/post/speech-recognition-challenges

What are we looking for?

• Opinionated takes on how to make quality breakthroughs in speech recognition. We want to have spirited, lively debate on how to create the frontier of voice AI, and are looking for someone who has the right instincts for setting this direction.

• Experience leading teams of researchers and engineers - ideally of ten or more people

• PhD in machine learning or related field (neuroscience, EE, etc)

• Strong publication track record at top conferences (ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, ICASSP)

• Fluency in Python and LLM development

• Attention to detail and eagerness to learn

• Aptitude and clarity of thought

• Creativity in R&D, excellence in engineering, and code velocity

We consider all qualified applicants without regard to legally protected characteristics and provide reasonable accommodations upon request.

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