AI Researcher (Voice)

About Us

At Tavus, we're building the human layer of AI. Our mission is to make human-AI interaction as natural as face-to-face interaction, enabling the human touch where it has been previously unscalable. We achieve this through pioneering research in multi-modal AI models for human perception and understanding, combined with state-of-the-art human avatar rendering and communication models. Our models power everything from text-to-video AI avatars to real-time conversational video experiences across industries like healthcare, recruiting, sales, education, and more. By enabling AI to see, hear, and communicate with human-like authenticity, we're creating the foundation for the next generation of AI employees, assistants, and companions.

We're a Series A company backed by top investors, including Sequoia, Y Combinator, and Scale VC. Join us in driving the future of human-AI interaction.

The Role

We’re looking for a Senior Researcher to join our core AI team. Our ideal partner-in-crime works well in startup environments, is comfortable prioritizing for themselves, and is always down to take calculated risks. We’re moving fast and not looking for people to come along for the ride - we’re looking for people to pave the path.

Your Mission

• Lead research efforts on generative video and audio models (ex: text-to-speech, speech-to-speech, audio-to-expression and other speech and multimodal AI topics)
• Work with the Applied ML team to help productionize our research
• Stay relevant with the latest advancements (and help us create the latest advancements!)

Requirements

• Have proven experience with flow matching, diffusion models, auto regressive networks in the audio domain.
• Have experience training deep learning models: from medium-sized to large models.
• Have experience building streaming text-to-speech models or speech-to-speech models
• Have strong foundations in audio modeling and demonstrated ability to innovate rapidly through prototyping.
• Know state-of-the-art architectures in representation learning: audio or image domain, face animation (in addition to having a deep understanding of the direct field of expertise above)
• Have excellent programming skills and be fluent in PyTorch
• Show evidence of original research, with publications in top-tier or solid second-tier venues (e.g., CVPR, NeurIPS, BMVC or equivalent).
• Be excited about building lifelike, expressive avatars for real-time applications.

Additional Experience (May Help)

• Skills in 3D graphics, Gaussian splatting
• Other, additional experience with generative models
• PhD or equivalent experience preferred
• Experience leading research teams
• Knowledge of best practices in Software Development

Location & Employment

• Salary: $160K - $250K
• Employment Type: FullTime
• Location Type: OnSite
• This position is preferably hybrid in San Francisco and we offer relocation. However we are open to remote candidates as well.

Benefits

When you join Tavus, you’re joining a family. Our work is driven by our team, and our success is shared by all. This position has a flexible work schedule, unlimited PTO, extremely competitive healthcare and gear stipends, as well as, of course, plenty of fun! At the end of the day, we want Tavus to be a place for you to learn, directly drive impact, and be with a team you love.

Our Hiring Philosophy

Tavus is growing fast, and we’d like you to grow with us! We are not looking for cultural fits, we are looking for culture creators. In fact, diversity is what drives our success – it’s at the core of how we hire, communicate, and work. We are inclusive to all and combine our diverse backgrounds, skill sets, and thinking to build the best experiences for our clients.