Staff Machine Learning Engineer
Otter.aiMountain View, California, United States · Posted 6 months agoDescription
The Opportunity
Do you want to lead projects to build and deploy cutting-edge AI technology to help people get unparalleled value from meetings and conversations? Join our core AI team responsible for ML and work alongside industry-veteran scientists and engineers. As a Staff Machine Learning Engineer, you’ll bring your strong software engineering mindset to machine learning in order to scale and optimize our ML systems—creating and transforming innovative research into production-ready features that power Otter’s summarization and conversational intelligence products.
Your Impact
- Architect, build, and evolve large-scale SID / ASR / NLP / LLM systems that power mission-critical product experiences including summarization, chat, and speech understanding across millions of conversations.
- Lead the design and implementation of training, fine-tuning, post-training, and inference strategies for large language and speech models using PyTorch and/or JAX, making principled trade-offs across quality, latency, cost, and reliability.
- Design and improve model architectures, loss functions, decoding strategies, and training techniques for speech and language models, informed by both research and production constraints.
- Own end-to-end ML system lifecycles, from research prototyping through production deployment, monitoring, iteration, and long-term maintenance.
- Partner deeply with product, and infrastructure teams to develop and translate cutting-edge research into scalable, production-grade systems that deliver measurable user and business impact.
- Drive system-level improvements in model performance, robustness, observability, and operational excellence using real-world conversational data at scale.
- Set technical direction and best practices for ML infrastructure, data pipelines, evaluation frameworks, and deployment workflows in a cloud environment.
- Identify and resolve complex, ambiguous problems in model behavior, data quality, scaling, and system interactions, often before they surface as user-visible issues.
- Mentor and elevate other engineers, influencing team standards, reviewing designs, and contributing to a culture of strong technical decision-making and execution.
- Influence applied research and technical roadmaps by identifying promising speech and multimodal modeling approaches, and driving their validation and adoption into production systems
We're Looking for Someone Who
- Holds a Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science or a related field with 10+ years of relevant industry experience; PhD is preferred.
- Has deep, hands-on experience building and fine-tuning large language or foundation models, with production experience in ASR, TTS, multimodal, or modern LLM/NLP systems.
- Demonstrates strong command of modern ML research, with the ability to critically evaluate new papers and drive innovation by identifying what is production-worthy versus experimental.
- Has experience deploying, scaling, monitoring, and operating ML systems in production across training, inference, and serving infrastructure.
- Is comfortable working with large-scale speech and conversational datasets, including data preprocessing, augmentation, quality analysis, and labeling strategies to support model training and evaluation.
- Can lead technical projects independently, driving clarity in ambiguous problem spaces and making sound architectural decisions.
- Has experience with or strong interest in agentic systems, tool-use frameworks, or multi-model orchestration.
About Otter.ai
We are in the business of shaping the future of work. Our mission is to make conversations more valuable.
With over 1B meetings transcribed, Otter.ai is the world’s leading tool for meeting transcription, summarization, and collaboration. Using artificial intelligence, Otter generates real-time automated meeting notes, summaries, and other insights from in-person and virtual meetings - turning meetings into accessible, collaborative, and actionable data that can be shared across teams and organizations. The company is backed by early investors in Google, DeepMind, Zoom, and Tesla.
Otter.ai is an equal opportunity employer. We proudly celebrate diversity and are dedicated to inclusivity.
Salary range
Salary Range: $278,000 to $330,000 USD per year.
This salary range represents the low and high end of the estimated salary range for this position. The actual base salary offered for the role is dependent based on several factors. Our base salary is just one component of our comprehensive total rewards package.
#LI-Hybrid
Similar jobs
Est. 247,500 USD
The OpportunityDo you want to lead projects to build and deploy cutting-edge AI technology to help people get unparalleled value from meetings and conversations? Join our core AI team responsible for ML and work alongsid…
Est. 208,500 USD
The OpportunityDo you want to lead projects to build and deploy cutting-edge AI technology to help people get unparalleled value from meetings and conversations? Join our core AI team responsible for ML and work alongsid…
Est. 247,500 USD
The OpportunityDo you want to lead projects to build and deploy cutting-edge AI technology to help people get unparalleled value from meetings and conversations? Join our core AI team responsible for ML and work alongsid…
Est. 207,500 USD
The Opportunity We are looking for a Senior AI Agent & LLM Engineer who combines strong software engineering capabilities with a deep focus on AI quality. You will help build and improve the AI systems behind Otter’s…
Est. 170,000 USD
The Opportunity We are looking for a Senior AI Agent & LLM Engineer who combines strong software engineering capabilities with a deep focus on AI quality. You will help build and improve the AI systems behind Otter’s…
Est. 150,250 USD
The Opportunity We are looking for a Software Engineer to lead feature development and serve as a technical expert, collaborating closely with key stakeholders across the organization. In this role, you will drive the pe…
Est. 242,500 USD
The OpportunityAre you an experienced Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Infrastructure) looking to make a significant impact at the intersection of scalable web services and cutting-edge AI technologies? We're seeking a…
Est. 207,500 USD
The OpportunityAre you an experienced Senior Software Engineer, Backend (Infrastructure) looking to make a significant impact at the intersection of scalable web services and cutting-edge AI technologies? We're seeking a…
Est. 207,500 USD
The Opportunity We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer to lead feature development and serve as a technical expert, collaborating closely with key stakeholders across the organization. In this role, you will drive…
Est. 207,500 USD
The OpportunityAre you an experienced Senior Software Engineer, Backend (Infrastructure) looking to make a significant impact at the intersection of scalable web services and cutting-edge AI technologies? We're seeking a…
Est. 242,500 USD
The OpportunityAre you an experienced Staff Software Engineer, Backend (Infrastructure) looking to make a significant impact at the intersection of scalable web services and cutting-edge AI technologies? We're seeking a…
Est. 170,000 USD
The Opportunity We are looking for an experienced Software Engineer with a passion for building robust and scalable data infrastructure to join our Data Platform team. In this role, you'll design and develop the foundati…
Est. 207,500 USD
The Opportunity We're excited to welcome a talented and passionate Senior Software Engineer to join our highly skilled team. The ideal candidate will hold a deep comprehension of search and recommendations algorithms and…
Est. 213,000 USD
The Opportunity Otter.ai just crossed 1 billion meetings transcribed. The enterprise motion is accelerating, and we're building the CS organization that will take us to the next level. This is your chance to help shape w…
Est. 207,500 USD
The Opportunity We're excited to welcome a talented and passionate Senior Software Engineer to join our highly skilled team. The ideal candidate will hold a deep comprehension of search and recommendations algorithms and…
Est. 197,500 USD
The opportunity We are seeking a hands-on Senior Manager, Sales Enablement to support Otter’s revenue organization as we scale our Enterprise platform. This is a player-coach role, balancing strategy with execution - bui…
Est. 170,000 USD
The Opportunity We are seeking a talented Engineer with extensive system knowledge who wants to be part of a team to build and operate large-scale systems that enables reliable and rapid deployment with effective monitor…
Est. 207,500 USD
The Opportunity We are looking for a Senior Data Engineer to join our Data Platform team and build the core data foundations that power analytics, experimentation, and decision-making across the company. In this role, yo…
Est. 207,500 USD
The Opportunity We're excited to welcome a talented and passionate Senior Software Engineer to join our highly skilled team. The ideal candidate will hold a deep comprehension of search and recommendations algorithms and…
Est. 145,000 USD
The Opportunity We're looking for a Senior Demand Generation Manager to manage strategic marketing campaigns and channels at Otter. You'll run multi-channel campaigns from brief to results, manage various website optimiz…
Est. 147,500 USD
The Opportunity We're looking for a Senior Field Marketing Manager to manage events strategy - putting Otter in front of enterprise buyers, and executing necessary follow through that turns presence into pipeline. You'll…
Est. 190,000 USD
Location: Bay Area (Hybrid – 3 days/week in San Francisco office or Mountain View HQ) The opportunity Are you ready to be part of our exciting journey of exponential growth? We are seeking a talented Mid-Market Account E…
Est. 230,000 USD
The Opportunity We're seeking a talented Staff Engineer to join our Frontend Team. In this role, the person will shape and drive feature development while collaborating with key stakeholders across our organization. We'r…
Est. 157,500 USD
The Opportunity We are a B2B AI SaaS company in active transition from a product-led growth model to a combined PLG + sales-led motion. Our CRM, data, and workflow infrastructure was built for self-serve — it was not bui…
Est. 218,500 USD
The Opportunity We are seeking a talented Senior Solution Architect with deep enterprise pre-sales experience who wants to own the technical sale for complex, multi-stakeholder deals and help define how our AI meeting in…
Est. 190,000 USD
Location: Bay Area (Hybrid – 3 days/week in San Francisco office or Mountain View HQ) The opportunity Are you ready to be part of our exciting journey of exponential growth? We are seeking a talented Mid-Market Account E…
Est. 160,000 USD
The Opportunity As a Growth Marketing Manager, you will be a key driver of Otter’s user acquisition engine—owning and scaling paid social channels while building a modern, AI-powered growth system. You’ll report to the H…
Est. 245,000 USD
The Opportunity This role is focused on expansion within Otter’s top accounts. You will own growth across a defined set of strategic customers, expanding into new teams, business units, and subsidiaries while introducing…
Est. 170,000 USD
The Opportunity We are seeking a hands-on Senior Analyst of GTM Systems to own and optimize our go-to-market technology stack. This role is central to enabling our revenue teams to operate at peak efficiency — managing t…
Est. 230,000 USD
About the Role Together AI is building the best inference infrastructure for voice applications. Our Voice AI platform powers production-grade, real-time voice agents and applications — serving speech-to-text and text-to…