Audio AI Engineer; human

Audio AI Engineer (human)

Neura Robotics
• Metzingen

In the AI Department, you will develop the cognitive audio capabilities that allow our robots to understand and interact with their surroundings. You will own the real‑time audio pipeline, model inference, and voice interface that turns human speech into meaning.

• Voice Interaction Stack: Build and own the edge‑to‑cloud hybrid ASR, TTS, wake‑word, voice‑activity detection, and NLU pipelines, optimizing for low latency, multi‑speaker scenarios, and noisy environments.
• Audio Encoder Research: Design, train, and integrate audio encoders for foundation models, and develop ambient and contact‑acoustic event recognition to give robots situational awareness.
• Real‑Time Audio Pipeline: Architect the shared audio substrate from microphones to model input—acquisition, denoising, beamforming, source separation, synchronization with vision and proprioception—and optimize for on‑robot compute and latency budgets.
• Models, Data & Evaluation: Evaluate, fine‑tune, and deploy state‑of‑the‑art speech and audio models; drive data collection from real deployments and build evaluation infrastructure that turns recordings into measurable improvements.
• Sensor Strategy & Integration: Help select and qualify audio hardware, define calibration and mounting requirements, and ensure clean integration with AI, hardware, and agentic stacks.

• Master’s or PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Computational Linguistics, or related field.
• 3+ years professional experience in audio‑related AI engineering.
• Proven track record with measurable impact through publications, shipped systems, or both.
• Depth in one of the following areas with curiosity across the others:
• Conversational AI: ASR, TTS, NLP/NLU, dialogue systems, real‑time speech systems with LLMs.
• Audio ML modeling: audio representation learning, multimodal foundation models with audio branch, generative audio.
• Embedded audio DSP: real‑time signal processing, mic‑array processing, low‑level audio I/O, quantized inference for on‑device deployment.
• Strong Python programming; C/C++ skills a plus.
• Familiarity with ROS or robotics middleware a plus.
• Experience with agentic frameworks and LLM tool‑use a plus.
• Experience with audio simulation, room acoustics, or spatial audio a plus.
• Hands‑on experience setting up audio recording equipment for ML data collection a nice to have.
• Team spirit, initiative, and willingness to explore new paths.
• Excellent English;
  German optional.

• Creative, flat‑hierarchy culture with flexible hours and 30 vacation days.
• Competitive salary package and employee discounts.
• Opportunity for professional growth and development support.
• Partner with an international team aiming to redefine robot assistants.
• Work‑life balance with company events and celebrated successes.

Metzingen, Germany (closely related to Riederich and Stuttgart).