Automatic Speech Recognition Engineer
Omilia · Remote
The ASR Engineer joins Omilia's Delivery ASR team to own the development, tuning, testing, deployment, and live performance of Omilia's ASR technology for enterprise customers' production IVR and voice-channel deployments. This role carries substantial responsibility and ownership: the ASR Engineer leads ASR solutions end-to-end, coordinating with other teams as needed, and is trusted to make sound judgment calls and manage their own work to meet tight deadlines.
Accountabilities
- Own end-to-end ASR tuning, model, and grammar delivery for a portfolio of live enterprise IVR/voice deployments, from requirements through go-live and ongoing optimization.
- Own root-cause investigation and resolution of production ASR issues, ensuring rapid recovery of customer-facing voice channels under time pressure.
- Own the technical relationship for assigned enterprise accounts, acting as the primary ASR delivery point of contact with customer and partner stakeholders.
- Drive measurable WER/SER improvements against production baselines through acoustic and language model design and fine-tuning, including modern neural approaches.
- Contribute to and help scale delivery automation to reduce manual turnaround across the team's release cadence.
- Ensure ASR solutions perform reliably across the team's production infrastructure and deployment environments spanning multiple global regions.
Key Responsibilities
- Tune ASR grammars, acoustic models, and language models for new locales, domains, and customer-specific vocabularies.
- Design, train, and fine-tune acoustic and language models, including modern neural approaches, with measurable WER/SER improvement.
- Investigate and resolve production ASR issues such as recognition failures and showstopper defects, engaging directly with internal and external customer/partner stakeholders.
- Run customer working sessions and translate technical tradeoffs for non-technical stakeholders.
- Represent ASR delivery in cross-functional forums with Product, Support, and Project Management.
- Build and maintain grammar-generation and other delivery automation pipelines to speed up release cycles.
- Monitor live ASR performance and proactively flag and address degradation before it affects customers.
- Deploy and validate ASR updates across production infrastructure spanning multiple global regions.
- Document tuning decisions, model versions, and configuration changes for auditability and knowledge sharing.
Requirements
Required:
- 5+ years of hands-on ASR/speech engineering experience, with substantial experience in production/live IVR or voice-channel deployments.
- Demonstrated track record supporting customers directly, ideally in regulated industries (banking, insurance, healthcare).
- Strong hands-on experience with ASR platforms such as Kaldi (or equivalent) — language modeling, acoustic modeling, grammar/lexicon design, and decoder tuning are required, not "nice to have."
- Solid programming ability (Python preferred; Bash, Java, or C++ also acceptable) and comfort in Linux environments.
- Academic background in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Computational Linguistics, Speech & Language Processing, or equivalent hands-on experience — a degree does not substitute for production experience at this level.
- Excellent spoken/written English and strong stakeholder communication skills; this role speaks directly with enterprise customers and partners.
- Comfortable owning ambiguous, production-critical problems independently, prioritizing across multiple accounts, and working under demanding deadlines.
Nice to have:
- Experience with modern neural ASR frameworks (e.g. wav2vec2, Whisper, or similar end-to-end models).
- Exposure to telephony/CCaaS platforms and IVR architectures.
- Familiarity with cloud infrastructure and MLOps practices for model deployment and monitoring.
- Additional spoken languages beyond English.
Benefits
- Fixed compensation;
- Long-term employment with the working days vacation;
- Development in professional growth (courses, training, etc);
- Being part of successful cutting-edge technology products that are making a global impact in the service industry;
- Proficient and fun-to-work-with colleagues;
- Apple gear
Omilia is proud to be an equal opportunity employer and is dedicated to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace. We believe that embracing diversity in all its forms enriches our workplace and drives our collective success. We are committed to creating an environment where everyone feels welcomed, valued, and empowered to contribute their unique perspectives without regard to factors such as race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, heredity, disability, age, or veteran status, all eligible candidates will be given consideration for employment.