Director of Research, Text to Speech

Deepgram provides real-time voice AI APIs and foundation models for speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and voice agents. The Director of Research will own the Text-to-Speech program end to end, setting research strategy, guiding technical direction, advancing speech-generation models, and building a high-performing research team that turns breakthroughs into production models.

Responsibilities:

• Own the TTS research and model roadmap — decide which technical directions can materially move speech-generation quality, including the expensive and non-obvious ones, and recognize when an approach should change or die
• Drive advances across neural audio modeling, prosody and expressiveness, controllability, multilingual speech, voice identity and consistency, data and training strategy, post-training, and inference performance — and make sure they land as measurable production gains
• Stay deeply technical: review research, challenge assumptions, design experiments, diagnose model failures, and take on the highest-leverage problems yourself
• Build evaluation and benchmarking that explains •why• models improve, not just whether they did — automated metrics alongside human perceptual assessment
• Lead a mix of individual contributors and tech lead managers. Hire and develop both, hold an exceptionally high technical bar, grow senior researchers into technical leaders, and set direction across sub-teams while pushing decisions down to the people closest to the work
• Partner with engineering and product leadership on ship-readiness, and represent Deepgram's TTS research internally and externally