Senior Staff Research Scientist
DeepL
full-time
Posted on:
Location Type: Hybrid
Location: Cologne • 🇩🇪 Germany
Visit company websiteJob Level
Senior
Tech Stack
PythonPyTorch
About the role
- Lead hands-on research and development across ASR, MT, TTS, and speech-to-speech translation for real-time voice products.
- Design, train, and optimize large-scale ASR models for multilingual accuracy, robustness, and ultra-low-latency streaming.
- Improve cascaded translation pipelines end to end: segmentation, ASR→MT interfaces, streaming MT inference, and incremental decoding.
- Develop and refine real-time TTS models with natural prosody, stable speaker characteristics, and fast inference.
- Build and experiment with end-to-end and LLM-based speech-to-speech translation systems, including streaming and one-shot approaches.
- Own the full lifecycle of model delivery: prototyping, ablations, training, evaluation, optimization, and production deployment.
- Work closely with engineering teams to integrate models into real-time systems, ensuring reliability, uptime, and quality at scale.
- Drive improvements in inference efficiency, model serving, voice UX, and robustness to real-world acoustic conditions.
- Establish strong practices for evaluation, reproducibility, monitoring, and continuous model improvement in production.
- Mentor researchers and engineers, promote hands-on collaboration, and raise the bar for model quality and operational excellence.
Requirements
- Deep expertise in speech, audio, or multilingual ML, particularly in ASR, MT, TTS, end-to-end ST, or large speech models.
- A hands-on builder who enjoys training models, running experiments, debugging pipelines, and integrating ML systems into production.
- Strong understanding of real-time streaming constraints and how to design models that operate reliably at low latency.
- Experience shipping ML models to production, maintaining them at scale, and working with engineers on deployment, monitoring, and serving.
- Ability to lead complex research efforts while staying grounded in product impact, user experience, and real-world performance.
- Strong coding and experimentation skills (Python, PyTorch/JAX, audio processing libraries).
- Ability to communicate clearly, collaborate across teams, and align research work with product and engineering priorities.
- Proven experience mentoring others and elevating technical quality across a fast-moving, applied research team.
Benefits
- Competitive benefits
- Open, welcoming work culture
Applicant Tracking System Keywords
Tip: use these terms in your resume and cover letter to boost ATS matches.
Hard skills
ASRMTTTSspeech-to-speech translationlarge-scale ASR modelsreal-time streamingmodel deliveryPythonPyTorchJAX
Soft skills
mentoringcollaborationcommunicationleadershipproblem-solvingdebuggingexperimentinguser experience focusproduct impact awarenesstechnical quality elevation