---
title: 'Senior Applied Scientist, Speech at Otter.ai'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-applied-scientist-speech-otter-ai-mountain-view-x076bttmnk8j'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-07'
---

# Senior Applied Scientist, Speech at Otter.ai

- **Company:** Otter.ai
- **Location:** Mountain View, CA
- **Posted:** 2026-08-17
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-07
- **Apply:** https://otter.ai/careers?gh_jid=7884371003

## Job description

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 Senior Applied Scientist, you’ll bring your strong software engineering mindset to machine learning in order to scale and optimize our speech 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 ASR and TTS systems that power mission-critical product experiences including speech understanding across millions of conversations.
- Lead the design and implementation of training, fine-tuning, post-training, and inference strategies for speech models using PyTorch making principled trade-offs across quality, latency, cost, and reliability.
- Design and improve model architectures, loss functions, decoding strategies, and training techniques for speech 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.

We're Looking for Someone Who

- Holds a Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science or a related field with 5+ years of relevant industry experience; PhD is preferred.
- Has deep, hands-on experience building and fine-tuning speech or foundation models, with production experience in ASR and/or TTS 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](http://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.

*Otter.ai does not accept unsolicited resumes from 3rd party recruitment agencies without a written agreement in place for permanent placements. Any resume or other candidate information submitted outside of established candidate submission guidelines (including through our website or via email to any Otter.ai employee) and without a written agreement otherwise will be deemed to be our sole property, and no fee will be paid should we hire the candidate.

Salary range

Salary Range: $230,000 to $265,000 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

## About Otter.ai

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: AI-powered meeting transcription and productivity software
- **Target customers**: B2B – enterprises, teams, sales, recruiting, education, and media professionals
- **Mission or purpose statement**: “Create smarter tools that free people up to do their best work.”

## Products & Services
- **Otter Meeting Agent**: AI notetaker that joins meetings, records conversations, provides live transcription (multi-language), automated summaries, action items, and insights. Available as a desktop app (Mac/Windows) and mobile. Integrates with CRM, calendar, and can be queried via Otter AI Chat.
- **Otter SDR Agent**: Handles live demos and booked meetings directly from a company’s website.
- **Otter Recruiting Agent**: Provides real-time interview assistance, structured candidate insights, and automated follow-ups.
- **Otter for Education**: Tailored transcription and note-taking for classroom or lecture settings.
- **Otter for Media**: Optimized for content creation and media workflows.
- **Otter AI Chat / MCP Server**: Connects meeting knowledge to AI chat tools like ChatGPT and Claude for deeper analysis and workflow automation.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed
- **Key Metrics**:
  - Annual Revenue: $12.9M (estimated)
  - Total Funding: $73M
  - Headcount: 202 employees (+14.6% YoY)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Spectrum Equity, Omega Venture Partners (lead Series B), Horizons Ventures, Draper Associates, DFJ DragonFund
- **Growth Signals**:
  - 14.6% headcount growth year-over-year
  - 30 active job postings (up 36.4% monthly, 57.9% quarterly)
  - Expanding product lineup with specialized AI agents (SDR, Recruiting)
  - Operating in 7 countries (US, Canada, UK, Philippines, Vietnam, Brazil, India)

## Competitive Advantages
- **Real-time, multi-language transcription** with speaker recognition and automated summaries – differentiates from basic recording tools.
- **Enterprise-grade security and governance** (compliance controls, data governance).
- **Integrated AI chat** that surfaces meeting knowledge across connected apps (CRM, MCP Server).
- **Specialized agents** (SDR, Recruiting) that automate workflows beyond note-taking.
- **High user satisfaction** (4.6/5 product rating) and strong employer brand (4.5/5 on Glassdoor, Great Place to Work certified).

## Strategic Focus
- Scaling AI capabilities beyond transcription into proactive meeting intelligence and workflow automation.
- Expanding enterprise adoption with tailored agents for sales, recruiting, and education.
- Deepening integrations with CRM and AI chat ecosystems (ChatGPT, Claude) to become a “Conversational Knowledge Engine.”
- Growing headcount and hiring across engineering, product, sales, marketing, and data science.

## Why Work Here
- **Hybrid work model**: Mix of in-office (Mountain View and San Francisco) and remote days; quarterly Bay Area gatherings.
- **Compensation**: Highly competitive salaries, equity option packages, 401(k) plan.
- **Time off**: Minimum 15 days PTO, 18 weeks maternity leave, 8 weeks paternity leave.
- **Health & wellness**: Comprehensive medical, dental, vision, life insurance, disability from day one.
- **Office perks**: Free parking, pet-friendly, on-site fitness center, putting green, bocce court, unlimited snacks.
- **Culture**: Values include Be Authentic, Think Team, Create Delight, Build Fast, Push Limits. High employee satisfaction (4.5/5 on Glassdoor) and Great Place to Work certified.
- **Engineering culture**: Strong technical talent pool (alumni from Google, Meta, Apple, Uber, AWS); 104 employees in technical roles (37% of workforce).

## Sources
1. [otter.ai (main site)](https://otter.ai/)
2. [otter.ai careers page](https://home.otter.ai/careers)
3. [LinkedIn company page](https://www.linkedin.com/company/otter-ai)
4. [Indeed company profile](https://www.indeed.com/cmp/Otter.ai)

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