LILT is hiring a Senior Research Engineer

LILT is looking for a Senior Research Engineer to join our Research & Engineering team. In this role, you will design, develop, and productionize cutting-edge Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems. You'll leverage open-source models to solve complex real-world challenges, including poor-quality audio and noisy, uncontrolled recording environments.

What You'll Do

• Design and implement production-grade prototypes for OCR and ASR systems based on open-source models.
• Build ASR systems resilient to severe audio challenges such as low/high volume, distortions, overlapping speech, unknown speaker counts, and off-axis microphone placement.
• Fine-tune and post-train ASR and OCR models for domain-specific accuracy improvements.
• Develop robust open-source systems for accurately identifying speakers in multi-speaker environments.
• Create systems capable of detecting both speech and environmental noises within recordings.
• Implement pipelines to isolate and export individual speaker audio into separate files.
• Engineer accurate segmentation of speech into logical and temporal units for downstream processing.

What We're Looking For

• Strong proficiency in Python and experience with popular open-source machine learning frameworks like PyTorch and TensorFlow.
• Hands-on experience with ASR/OCR open-source toolkits such as Kaldi, Vosk, Whisper, and Tesseract.
• Deep understanding of speech signal processing and noise-robust ASR techniques.
• Familiarity with speaker diarization, source separation, and audio preprocessing methods.
• Experience in deploying production-grade machine learning systems at scale.
• Strong problem-solving skills and ability to work with ambiguous, noisy datasets.

Nice to Have

• Background in computational linguistics, speech technology, or related fields.
• Contributions to open-source speech or OCR projects.
• Knowledge of GPU acceleration and optimization for training and inference.

Technical Stack

• Languages: Python
• Frameworks: PyTorch, TensorFlow
• Toolkits: Kaldi, Vosk, Whisper, Tesseract

Team & Environment

You will be part of the Research & Engineering team at LILT.

Benefits & Compensation

• Compensation: At market salary, meaningful equity, 401(k) matching, and flexible time off plus company holidays.
• Medical Benefits: Coverage of medical, dental, and vision insurance, plus FSA/DFSA, HSA, and Commuter benefits.
• LILT pays for basic life insurance, short-term disability, and long-term disability.
• Paid parental leave is provided after 6 months.
• Monthly lifestyle benefit stipend via the Fringe platform to allow employees to customize benefits to their lifestyle.

Work Mode

This role follows a hybrid work model. Positions are located in Berlin, Germany and the Washington D.C. metropolitan area.

LILT is an equal opportunity employer. We extend equal opportunity to all individuals without regard to an individual’s race, religion, color, national origin, ancestry, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic characteristics, veteran or marital status, pregnancy, or any other classification protected by applicable local, state or federal laws.