Principal Audio Scientist

Description

Fauna Robotics is building capable, safe, and delightful robots for everyday life, and voice is one of the most natural ways people will interact with them. Cloud speech and language models are good and getting better, but they can only work with the audio they receive, and a robot is a hard place to listen. Its microphones sit beside motors, fans, and moving joints. It speaks through its own loudspeaker while people talk over it. It moves, turns, and shares a room with several people at once. We are hiring a Principal Audio Scientist to be Fauna's technical authority on how our robots hear.

You will design, prototype, and ship the hardest algorithms in the robot's audio system. You will set the audio architecture that other engineers build on, shape hardware decisions across robot generations, mentor the engineers and scientists working on audio, and be the person teams come to when the robot can't hear.

Key job responsibilities
- Set the long-range science roadmap and technical architecture for the robot's audio system, and serve as Fauna's primary technical authority on robot hearing

- Design and implement suppression of the robot's own noise from motors, fans, and moving joints

- Design and implement echo cancellation for the robot's own voice, so people can interrupt it naturally

- Develop multi-microphone processing that holds up as the robot and the people around it move, including locating who is speaking so the robot can turn toward them

- Make on-robot listening decisions robust to internal and external noise sources: wake word, voice activity, and whether speech is directed at the robot

- Drive microphone and speaker placement, enclosure acoustics, and vibration isolation decisions with mechanical, electrical, and industrial design, backed by your own measurements

- Design the robot-specific data collection and evaluation methods to validate the performance of our audio design

- Present audio science and its tradeoffs to senior leadership and partner teams

- Mentor scientists and engineers, raising the scientific bar for audio across the organization through design reviews, code reviews, and hiring

Basic Qualifications

- Experience influencing multiple stakeholders and leading cross functional teams across geographies and business units
- PhD in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Acoustics, or a related field and 7+ years of relevant research experience after degree, or a Master's degree and 12+ years of equivalent experience
- Deep, hands-on expertise in multi-microphone audio processing, such as beamforming, echo cancellation, and noise suppression
- Track record of designing and shipping audio front-end algorithms on a physical device with its own acoustic challenges, such as a smart speaker, wearable, vehicle, or robot
- Experience influencing hardware decisions on microphone array design and acoustic integration

Preferred Qualifications

- Experience suppressing device-generated noise from motors, fans, or mechanical vibration
- Experience with sound source localization or tracking moving talkers
- Experience adapting wake word or voice activity detection to noisy, far-field conditions
- Experience optimizing audio algorithms for real-time execution on embedded or edge hardware
- Experience with robotics, or with sensor fusion that combines audio with other sensors such as cameras or joint state
- Experience mentoring scientists and engineers
- Publications and/or patents in audio or speech processing

Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of protected veteran status, disability, or other legally protected status.

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The base salary range for this position is listed below. Your Amazon package will include sign-on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs). Final compensation will be determined based on factors including experience, qualifications, and location. Amazon also offers comprehensive benefits including health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription, Basic Life & AD&D insurance and option for Supplemental life plans, EAP, Mental Health Support, Medical Advice Line, Flexible Spending Accounts, Adoption and Surrogacy Reimbursement coverage), 401(k) matching, paid time off, and parental leave. Learn more about our benefits at https://amazon.jobs/en/benefits.