---
title: 'Senior/Staff AI Research Engineer at Hume AI'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-staff-ai-research-engineer-hume-ai-nyc-san-jose-rfxxk2mrybcr'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-14'
---

# Senior/Staff AI Research Engineer at Hume AI

- **Company:** Hume AI
- **Location:** Nyc San Jose, OR
- **Compensation:** $180k–$350k
- **Work type:** remote
- **Posted:** 2024-02-23
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-14
- **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/humeai/jobs/4003488008

## Job description

Hume AI is seeking talented researchers and engineers interested in working with our AI research team to build state-of-the-art speech-language models (SLMs). Our new SLM training method—reinforcement learning from human expression (RLHE)—learns human preferences from behavior in millions of audio and video recordings, making SLMs superhumanly helpful, interesting, funny, eloquent, honest, and altruistic. Join us in the heart of New York City and contribute to our endeavor to ensure that AI is guided by human values, the most pivotal challenge (and opportunity) of the 21st century.

## About Us

Hume AI is a Series B startup dedicated to building artificial intelligence that is directly optimized for human well-being. As the first company to release speech language models, we’re focused on expanding our research to encompass audio understanding models and evaluation platforms for enterprises.

Our goal is to enable a future in which technology draws on an understanding of human emotional expression to better serve human goals. As part of our mission, we also conduct groundbreaking scientific research, publish in leading scientific journals like [Nature](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01489-2), and support a non-profit, The Hume Initiative, that has released the first concrete ethical guidelines for empathic AI ([www.thehumeinitiative.org](http://www.thehumeinitiative.org/)). You can learn more about us on our website (https://hume.ai/) and read about us in [WIRED](https://www.wired.com/story/hume-ai-emotional-intelligence/), [Forbes](https://www.forbes.com/sites/rashishrivastava/2024/03/27/feeling-sad-excited-or-bored-this-startup-claims-its-ai-can-mostly-tell/), and [Venturebeat](https://venturebeat.com/ai/who-needs-gpt-4o-voice-mode-humes-evi-2-is-here-with-emotionally-inflected-voice-ai-and-api/).

## About the Role

We are looking for talented researchers and engineers interested in working with our team to build state-of-the-art audio models and evaluation tools. In this role, you will build out software systems that support distributed model training, inference, and benchmarking as well as massive-scale data collection, storage, preprocessing, and analysis. You will be working to solve some of today’s most exciting AI research problems at industry scale.

## Requirements

- Expertise in the Python ecosystem and popular ML libraries and tools (e.g. PyTorch)

- Experience writing robust and maintainable production-ready code

- Comfort iterating quickly on new and uncertain research directions

- 2+ years of experience training and/or fine-tuning transformer models with large-scale datasets of text, audio, image, and/or video data

Application Note

Please apply only to the position that best aligns with your qualifications. If you submit multiple applications or have applied within the past 6 months, only your initial submission will be considered. Annual Salary $180,000—$350,000 USD

## About Hume AI

## Core Business
- Primary industry: Research Services / Emotion AI / Voice AI
- Target customers: B2B (developers, enterprises, healthcare, finance, creative industries)
- Mission: “to ensure that artificial intelligence is developed in ways that are beneficial to humanity” and “serve human goals and emotional well-being”

## Products & Services
- **Empathic Voice Interface (EVI)**: A real-time, emotionally intelligent voice AI that measures vocal modulations and responds with a speech-language model trained on millions of human interactions. Supports interruptibility, back-channeling, and expressive instruction following. (Closed-source, API)
- **Octave TTS**: A text-to-speech system built on LLM intelligence, enabling context-aware, expressive speech synthesis with voice design, cloning, and modulation. (Closed-source, API)
- **Expression Measurement Models**: State-of-the-art models for voice, face, and language that capture hundreds of dimensions of human expression (48+ emotions, 600+ voice descriptors). Available via API for batch and streaming analysis. (Closed-source, API)
- **Human Feedback API**: Allows developers to create and manage evaluation studies with a worldwide pool of vetted participants for preference data. (API)
- **Open-Source Models & Datasets**: Publicly available speech-language models, datasets (e.g., TADA), and evaluation tools for the community. (Open-source)

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not disclosed
- **Total Funding**: $75.7M (LinkedIn) / $74.02M (CB Insights) – conflicting reports; both cited
- **Key Metric**: Annual estimated revenue of $1.9M (LinkedIn estimate)
- **Notable Investors**: Aegis Ventures (Seed), Union Square Ventures (Series A), EQT Ventures (Series B); also includes participation from other investors across rounds
- **Growth Signals**: Series B of $50M raised in March 2024; 43 employees (as of mid-2026) with a monthly growth rate of +6%; operates in 7 countries; recent launch of Octave 2 (preview) and EVI 4-mini with expanded language support and lower latency

## Competitive Advantages
- **Emotional Intelligence**: Decades of research in multimodal emotional intelligence (10+ years) and semantic space theory pioneered by Alan Cowen (Chief Scientific Advisor)
- **Speech-Language Model**: Unique integration of language modeling and TTS for expressive, context-aware speech that reduces hallucinations and latency
- **Open-Source Leadership**: Releases state-of-the-art models and datasets to the community, fostering adoption and trust
- **Fine-Grained Emotion Capture**: 48+ emotions, 600+ voice descriptors, and support for 50+ languages
- **Domain-Specific Datasets**: Tailored datasets for healthcare, finance, and conversational audio

## Strategic Focus
- **Current Priorities**: Advancing empathic voice AI with lower latency and broader language support; deepening developer ecosystem via APIs and SDKs; expanding into enterprise use cases (call centers, coaching, digital companions, health monitoring)
- **Direction**: Continue open-sourcing research while commercializing closed-source APIs; grow the research team and platform engineering capabilities

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Mission-driven research lab focused on building AI for human well-being; collaborative and intellectually rigorous environment
- **Remote/Hybrid**: Remote-friendly with flexible options; hubs in New York (HQ), San Jose, and remote worldwide
- **Benefits & Perks**: Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage; meaningful equity packages; annual learning stipend for conferences and courses; flexible PTO; regular team offsites
- **Engineering Culture**: Emphasis on cutting-edge research, open-source contributions, and cross-disciplinary work (AI, speech, emotion science); roles include AI Researchers, Senior/Staff AI Research Engineers, and Senior Platform Engineers

## Sources
1. [Hume AI Official Site](https://hume.ai/)
2. [Hume AI Careers](https://www.hume.ai/careers)
3. [LinkedIn Company Page](https://www.linkedin.com/company/hume-ai)
4. [CB Insights Profile](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/hume-ai)
5. [Hume API Documentation](https://developer.hume.ai/)

## Other roles at Hume AI

- [Senior Platform Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-platform-engineer-hume-ai-new-york-new-york-jdsfqq3sh4e5) — New York New York, United States
- [Senior Software Engineer - Backend & Machine Learning](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-backend-machine-learning-hume-ai-new-york-new-york-wb2j7yff5grj) — New York New York, United States
- [AI Researcher](https://feeny.ai/job/ai-researcher-hume-ai-nyc-san-jose-jzn172tkk9x4) — Nyc San Jose, OR
- [Open Role](https://feeny.ai/job/open-role-hume-ai-nyc-san-jose-fh23yft7phfw) — Nyc San Jose, OR