Technical Engineering Manager @ AssemblyAI

About AssemblyAI

At AssemblyAI, we’re creating a leading Applied AI company by building powerful models to transcribe and understand audio data, exposed through a straightforward web API.

Progress in AI is moving at an unprecedented pace–we keep our pulse on the latest developments and breakthroughs in AI research and use these advances to inform our production-ready AI models. Our Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) models already outperform companies like Google, AWS, and Microsoft - which is why hundreds of companies and thousands of developers are using our API to transcribe and understand millions of videos, podcasts, phone calls, and Zoom meetings every day.

We’ve raised funding by leading investors including Accel, Insight Partners, Y Combinator’s AI Fund, Patrick and John Collision, Nat Friedman, and Daniel Gross. As part of a huge and emerging market, AssemblyAI is well on its way to becoming the leader in applied AI.

Join our world-class, remote team and help us build an iconic AI company!

About the role:

We’re looking for a Staff+ technical leader to partner with our research team and manage, lead, and grow our Research Engineering / ML Ops team as we scale and mature the platform. You’ll partner with our lead architect and a team of 6+ engineers to define and execute on a long term (1+ year) roadmap for our next-generation audio data processing and model training platform while expanding the platform for broader research and internal uses. This will include considerations around regionalization, high-bandwidth data (i.e. audio) processing, and leveraging the latest compute hardware (e.g. TPUs, Inferentia, etc) to support delivery of SOTA ASR models.

Someone that was a strong individual contributor (IC), has experience evolving large data platforms over time, has a strong architectural mindset, and has more recently transitioned into a people management role would be an ideal candidate. Being able to mentor more junior engineers is a must.

You should have a core understanding of the fundamentals around CI/CD, monitoring and alerting, SLOs/SLAs, canaries, and pipeline resiliency. Understanding the value of code reviews, small incremental changes, and testing will be critical to this role.

This is an ideal opportunity for someone to get closer to machine learning by applying software engineering principles on the surrounding infrastructure, without needing direct research experience.

What You’ll Do:

Have an ownership mindset, drive alignment among teams and push for best practices
Have successfully partnered with internal teams to coordinate large spanning initiatives
Have a demonstrated track record of growing engineers of all levels to the next level
Are technical, and capable of having in-depth discussions with engineers about decisions they are making, especially around scaling and resiliency
Are detail-oriented, analytical, and creative problem solver with a passion for quality processes

What You’ll Need:

7+ years of experience working with large scale production-quality data platforms (including data and pipeline SLO, monitoring, alerting, etc)
2+ years defining, executing and landing a long term (4+ quarter) vision for a single project or team
3+ years experience as Technical Lead
5+ years of experience in Java/python and 2+ years of experience in python/Java
1+ years of hands-on technical management experience w/team of 4 or more
3+ years of experience using task tracking systems such as Jira
2+ years working with stakeholders (PM, TPM, leadership, etc)

Nice to Have:

Experience in a mono-repo environment, using trunk-based development
Experience using Terraform, or other Infrastructure-as-code principles
Experience using Bazel as primary build tool
ML Ops experience
Experience training models, especially on TPU’s
Experience building on GCP
gRPC, protocol buffer, DataFlow

Pay Transparency:

AssemblyAI strives to recruit and retain exceptional talent from diverse backgrounds while ensuring pay equity for our team. Our salary ranges are based on paying competitively for our size, stage and industry, and are one part of many compensation, benefits and other reward opportunities we provide.

There are many factors that go into salary determinations, including relevant experience, skill level and qualifications assessed during the interview process, and maintaining internal equity with peers on the team. The range shared below is a general expectation for the function as posted, but we are also open to considering candidates who may be more or less experienced than outlined in the job description. In this case, we will communicate any updates in the expected salary range.

Lastly, the provided range is the expected salary for candidates in the U.S. Outside of those regions, there may be a change in the range, which again, will be communicated to candidates.

Salary range: $200k-$250k+

Working at AssemblyAI

We are a small but mighty group of problem solvers, innovators, and experienced AI researchers with over 20 years of expertise in Machine Learning, Speech Recognition, and NLP. As a fully remote team, we’re looking for people to join our team who are ambitious, curious, and self-motivated. We put a lot of trust and autonomy into everyone on our team and want to find people who will add to our culture, not just fit in.

We’re committed to creating a space where our employees can bring their full selves to work and have equal opportunity to succeed. So regardless of race, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, religion, origin, ability, age, veteran status, if joining this mission speaks to you, we encourage you to apply!

Keep Exploring AssemblyAI:

Check us out on YouTube!

Learn more about AI models for speech recognition

Core Transcription | Audio Intelligence | LeMUR | Try the Playground

Our $30M Series B fundraise