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Posted 1 week, 6 days ago

Namecoach / Euphonia

Founding Voice AI Engineer

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Roles

Founding Voice AI Engineer

Compensation

USD 30 - 120

Part-time contract; ~$30-120/hr by seniority. Paid take-home and paid trial month. Potential conversion to full-time. Series A closed, bridge to B in motion.

Salary period
hourly
Location basis
unclear
Equity
0.25–1.0% NSO grant with 4-year vesting and 1-year cliff for the right fit. Larger grants (up to ~1.5%) available for senior candidates who elect a lower-cash structure, or for the right person growing into CAIO.

Benefits

  • Paid take-home
  • Paid trial month
  • Potential conversion to full-time role

Tech stack

ASR LLM G2P Generative AI agent frameworks Agentic AI Knowledge Graphs Speech Recognition linguistics HuggingFace ecosystem Identity resolution Computational Linguistics TTS Weights Python PyTorch multilingual NLP Founding- experience at an early-stage AI company Phonetics AI Entity matching IPA MLflow Machine Learning NLP Claude Claude Code Speech Synthesis Cursor voice Grapheme-to-Phoneme JAX TensorFlow Biases Speech Science

Required

Grapheme-to-Phoneme (G2P)IPAASRTTSClaude CodeCursorPythonMachine LearningAILinguisticsSpeech RecognitionSpeech SynthesisVOICENLPPyTorchGenerative AILLMsClaudeAgentic AI

Nice to have

Computational LinguisticsPhoneticsSpeech ScienceMultilingual NLPIdentity resolutionEntity matchingKnowledge graphsFounding-engineer experience at an early-stage AI company

Location

San Francisco, CA, United States, Remote

Work setup

Employment
contract, part-time
Level
Senior
Remote policy
REMOTE; flexible hours with ~2hr/day overlap with US Pacific. Part-time to start; potential conversion to full-time.
Remote scope
timezone-limited
Timezones
~2hr/day overlap with US Pacific
Travel
unclear
Relocation
unclear
Visa
Not Available
Authorization
unclear
Clearance
unclear

Role details

Responsibilities

  • Build and ship voice AI engineering work for G2P, IPA, and ASR/TTS internals
  • Develop and evaluate models around speech recognition and grapheme-to-phoneme conversion
  • Improve pronunciation correctness for names, acronyms, and out-of-vocabulary terms by sitting in front of TTS engines
  • Collaborate and iterate quickly using agentic dev tools like Claude Code and Cursor
  • Build the AI systems that learn from corrections and improve pronunciation predictions and controls
  • fine-tune G2P and pronunciation models on our proprietary dataset
  • build multi-model AI validation pipelines that produce confidence scores and model provenance
  • design data architecture for verified pronunciation entries that persist and reuse high-confidence results
  • build context-aware ranking systems that pick the right pronunciation given identity, locale, and prior confirmations
  • develop related proprietary work
  • Build MCP-style integrations and SDKs so developers building on voice infrastructure and orchestration platforms can drop in Namecoach pronunciation quality with a few lines of code
  • Implementation work for current partners and customers
  • Pronunciation benchmarks
  • Reverse-mode pronunciation coaching
  • Help Namecoach itself operate as an AI-native company
  • ship product
  • do targeted research and writing that builds individual and company expertise

Requirements

  • Comfortable shipping with agentic dev tools like Claude Code and Cursor
  • Comfortable working with grapheme-to-phoneme, IPA, and ASR/TTS internals
  • Ability to build and evaluate models around recognition and G2P

Application

Email hiring+hn@name-coach.com with a short note on what interests you and a link to something you’ve built. G2P / TTS / ASR open-source work gets read first.

Portfolio
unclear
GitHub
preferred
Cover letter
not required
Apply flow
email

Company context

Make any TTS engine pronounce names, acronyms, and out-of-vocabulary terms correctly with phoneme-level control

Product
Provider-neutral middleware layer that makes TTS engines pronounce names and out-of-vocabulary terms correctly
Industry
Voice AI / Speech technology
Stage
Series A
Funding
Series A closed; bridge to B in motion
Open source
G2P / TTS / ASR open-source work gets read first

Contact

hiring+hn@name-coach.com

Description

Namecoach has spent 10 years building the largest verified pronunciation dataset: ~2M self-recorded name pronunciations plus human-verified phonetic spellings. They are building Euphonia (https://euphonia.namecoach.ai/), a provider-neutral middleware layer that makes any TTS engine pronounce names, acronyms, and out-of-vocabulary terms correctly. The role is a 0 to 1 founding Voice AI engineering position focused on speech and phonetics depth: grapheme-to-phoneme, IPA, ASR/TTS internals, and building and evaluating models around them (especially recognition and G2P). The candidate should be comfortable shipping with agentic dev tools like Claude Code and Cursor. Part-time to start with flexible hours and ~2hr/day overlap with US Pacific. Includes a paid take-home and a paid trial month before longer term; potential conversion to full-time. Series A closed, bridge to B in motion. Hiring instructions: email hiring+hn@name-coach.com with a short note on what interests you and a link to something you’ve built; G2P / TTS / ASR open-source work gets read first.

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