Lead Research Engineer

We want to radically improve how we humans communicate with each other. Our first step at Ava is to empower 450M deaf and hard-of-hearing people to live in a fully accessible world.

Every day, millions of people are excluded from conversations because they cannot hear what others say well. Our CEO Thibault grew up in a Deaf family & witnessed firsthand how the world was not accessible for them. Together with our CTO Skinner — deaf since age 2 — Thibault co-founded Ava to make live captioning of conversations as easy as turning on captions on TV.

Our small but fast-growing team has reinvented AI-based speech recognition technology to be in service of people who need it the most. We dream of a 24/7 accessible world, without any communication barrier.

In this pursuit, we're seeing how critical communication skills are, yet very far from ideal, to unleash our collective potential. This is for us the last barrier to be lifted.

Our belief is that well-designed technology can help everyone communicate and connect better — much more effectively and authentically — so humanity can achieve the greatest things together.

We want to make the seemingly impossible equation of collaboration 1 + 1 = 3, work every time. In other words, make 1 & 1 = 3 a reality.

Why this Role?

Actually change lives at an unprecedented scale: How often do you hear about apps that make people cry of joy? It is really for us a unique opportunity and privilege to be able to meaningfully improve the lives of 100,000s of people - and yet to still be at the very beginning of our mission!

Work with some of the best people in the world: We have an incredibly talented and passionate team that is a lot of fun to work with. We're still super small and have accomplished some things that were thought impossible!

Tackle our most interesting and impactful problems: Our AI team is still small, and people wear many hats. You'd jump between machine-learning models, infrastructure, internal tools, process — participating in every phase from inception to implementation. Absolutely no boredom.

Join us at an incredible time: We're well-funded and hit product-market fit, which gives us a huge green field to work with. You'd join at the perfect time to shape what we build and how we grow, so we can create a more inclusive world.

So what will you do as a Research Engineer at Ava?

• You'll own designing and scaling Ava's AI infrastructure, supporting mission-critical algorithms for our users.
• You'll help improve the performance, reliability and monitoring of our cutting-edge AI systems — such as improving the speed and responsiveness of our deep neural network.
• You'll work with the AI team to build and maintain robust internal machine-learning tools and processes with a focus on the data pipeline. Think of projects such as integrating supervised data at scale to our models, a critical project to improve the accuracy of Ava.
• You'll own the deployment processes and best practices to ensure the coordination of the AI team internally and in coordination with Ava's CTO.
• You'll help find, vet and lead a team of data engineers and scientists to support the AI team goals.

• You have experience scaling production software and machine learning models. You've worked on a product experiencing rapid growth and understand what needs to be done to scale to the next level.
• You can readily learn most technologies as you go. To you, technologies are about tools and tradeoffs, not an ideology.
• You care about the strategic and business implications of anything you build. You're not just going after cool stuff — you understand the balance between craft, speed, and the bottom line.
• You've spent meaningful time (3+ years) as an engineer or tech lead — or even better, you've managed a team before and have experience with agile development.
• Bonus: You're fluent with NodeJS, Python, noSQL and React.
• Bonus: You have experience in building deep learning models, especially speech recognition and natural language processing systems.

All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.