Speech Software Engineer

At ASAPP, our mission is simple: deliver the best AI-powered customer experience-faster than anyone else. We are guided by principles that shape how we think, build, and execute, including deep customer obsession, purposeful speed, ownership, and a relentless focus on outcomes. We work in small, highly skilled teams, prioritize clarity over complexity, and continuously evolve through curiosity, data, and craftsmanship.

We’re building a globally diverse team of technologists and problem solvers who thrive in fast-paced environments, value collaboration, and approach every challenge with a Day 1 mindset. With hubs in New York City, Mountain View, Latin America, and India. If you’re driven by continuous learning, rapid iteration, and the challenge of building in a high-growth startup, this is more than a role—it’s a journey.

We are seeking a Senior Speech Software Engineer to drive both the infrastructure and applied speech intelligence behind our real-time voice AI platform. This is not just a systems role — you will operate at the intersection of speech research, model optimization, and production engineering, ensuring our ASR and TTS systems meet the demanding quality, latency, and reliability requirements of enterprise call centers.

You will help evolve our speech stack to deliver human-like, low-latency voice interactions at massive scale, tuning and adapting modern speech models to perform in noisy, real-world customer environments. You will work closely with Speech Scientists, ML Researchers, and Infrastructure Engineers to bridge cutting-edge speech technology with hardened production systems.

• Tune and optimize ASR and TTS models for real-world call center environments, improving transcription accuracy, noise robustness, and speaker variability
• Improve spoken output naturalness by refining prosody, pacing, number and spelling pronunciation, and conversational flow
• Balance latency vs. quality tradeoffs in streaming speech pipelines to maintain real-time responsiveness
• Evaluate and integrate emerging speech technologies (e.g., noise suppression, voice activity detection, diarization) to measurably improve performance

• Architect and modernize a scalable, high-availability voice infrastructure that replaces legacy systems
• Build multi-threaded, low-latency server frameworks capable of handling thousands of concurrent real-time audio streams
• Design and operate streaming ASR -> LLM -> TTS pipelines that power live AI-driven customer conversations
• Develop robust media stream handling to ensure reliable audio flow between telephony providers, clients, and ML services

• Define and implement speech quality evaluation frameworks, including WER/CER analysis, latency tracking, and perceptual TTS metrics
• Build tooling and dashboards to monitor production performance and detect regressions in accuracy, latency, or naturalness
• Create load-testing and simulation tools to model high-concurrency, real-world voice traffic

• Partner with Speech Scientists and ML Researchers to product ionize new ASR and TTS models
• Work with Security and Compliance teams to ensure voice data handling meets enterprise and regulatory standards
• Collaborate with Product teams to translate conversational quality requirements into measurable system improvements

• 5+ years of software engineering experience building and operating production-grade distributed systems
• Strong proficiency in Golang or Python (or willingness to become an expert quickly)
• Experience designing low-latency, high-concurrency systems, ideally involving real-time media or…