Senior Applied Researcher, Audio Understanding

Senior Applied Researcher, Audio Understanding Cartesia San Francisco, CA, USA USD 200k-350k / year + Equity Posted on Sep 17, 2025 Apply now Location HQ - San Francisco, CA Employment Type Full time Location Type On-site Department Staff Compensation $200K - $350K • Offers Equity About Cartesia Our mission is to build the next generation of

AI:

ubiquitous, interactive intelligence that runs wherever you are. Today, not even the best models can continuously process and reason over a year-long stream of audio, video and text—1B text tokens, 10B audio tokens and 1T video tokens—let alone do this on-device. We're pioneering the model architectures that will make this possible. Our founding team met as PhDs at the Stanford AI Lab, where we invented State Space Models or SSMs, a new primitive for training efficient, large-scale foundation models. Our team combines deep expertise in model innovation and systems engineering paired with a design-minded product engineering team to build and ship cutting edge models and experiences. We're funded by leading investors at Index Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners, along with Factory, Conviction, A Star, General Catalyst, SV Angel, Databricks and others. We're fortunate to have the support of many amazing advisors, and 90+ angels across many industries, including the world's foremost experts in AI. The Role As a Senior Applied Researcher in Audio Understanding, you will be responsible for tackling the most challenging problems in audio perception. Your work will go beyond traditional speech recognition to encompass the full spectrum of audio perception, from identifying speakers and interpreting emotion to understanding complex acoustic environments. You will lead high-impact projects that are critical to our mission of building truly aware AI. What you'll do Architect and develop novel, large-scale models for complex audio understanding tasks, including multi-speaker ASR, diarization, and non-speech audio classification and deploy them to production at scale. Pioneer research in areas like self-supervised learning for audio, few-shot learning, and robust audio-visual perception. Set new standards for how we evaluate and benchmark our audio understanding systems. Build large scale pre-training and fine-tuning datasets for audio understanding capabilities. What we're looking for Deep expertise in ASR, audio understanding, language modeling, or generative modeling more broadly. Experience with large-scale training, GPU/TPU acceleration, and model optimization. Strong applied mindset—able to balance scientific novelty with product impact. Our culture 🏢 We're an in-person team based out of San Francisco. We love being in the office, hanging out together and learning from each other everyday. 🚢 We ship fast. All of our work is novel and cutting edge, and execution speed is paramount. We have a high bar, and we don't sacrifice quality and design along the way. 🤝 We support each other. We have an open and inclusive culture that's focused on giving everyone the resources they need to succeed. Our perks 🍽 Lunch, dinner and snacks at the office. 🏥 Fully covered medical, dental, and vision insurance for employees. 🏦 401(k). ✈️ Relocation and immigration support. 🦖 Your own personal Yoshi.

Compensation Range:

$200K - $350K Apply now See more open positions at Cartesia