Principal Research & Engineering, Realtime Voice AI

<div class="content-intro"><h2><strong>About Inflection AI</strong></h2> <p>Inflection AI is a Public Benefit Corporation empowering people with human-centered, emotionally intelligent AI. We’re shaping the future of AI by combining emotional intelligence (EQ) and raw intelligence (IQ) to elevate people’s potential.<br><br>Inflection AI created Pi, the world’s first emotionally intelligent AI, to help people work through decisions, emotions, and challenges. Pi is a personal AI agent powered by Inflection AI’s foundation model, proving that AI can be personal, empathetic, and contextually aware.</p></div><h2><strong>About the Role</strong></h2> <p>Voice is becoming the highest-stakes interface for AI, where quality depends on speed, naturalness, interruption handling, emotional nuance, and reliability in real-world conditions. We are looking for a hands-on technical leader to define and build Inflection’s realtime Voice AI stack across speech models, streaming systems, voice-agent runtime, and evaluation. This person will help shape how emotionally intelligent AI shows up in spoken interactions, partnering across research, engineering, product, and design to deliver voice agents that feel responsive, trustworthy, and useful in enterprise settings.<br><br></p> <p><strong>What You’ll Do</strong></p> <ul> <li>Establish the technical roadmap for Inflection's realtime Voice AI stack, encompassing streaming ASR, TTS, speech-to-speech, speech LLMs, turn-taking, barge-in, latency, and reliability.</li> <li>Utilize a 1,000 GPU cluster to support performance benchmarking and extensive experimentation.</li> <li>Determine build-vs-buy-vs-train strategies for core audio, speech, and realtime interaction components.</li> <li>Direct research and engineering efforts focused on speech quality, naturalness, expressiveness, emotional fit, controllability, and production readiness.</li> <li>Collaborate with infrastructure, product, design, and agentic AI teams to deploy voice agents for