AI Engineer

About CNTXT

The Role

Speech Synthesis (TTS)

Speech Recognition (ASR)

Speech-to-Speech

Arabic Language Challenges

What You'll Work On

• Benchmark and evaluate TTS and ASR models on Arabic test sets — measuring WER, speaker similarity (SIM), naturalness, and dialect coverage across MSA and regional varieties
• Fine-tune pretrained TTS models on curated Arabic data — including ablations on diacritized vs. undiacritized input, dialect-specific training splits, and voice prompt conditioning
• Experiment with audio tokenizer and codec configurations — comparing discrete RVQ representations against continuous latent approaches and their effect on Arabic phoneme accuracy
• Build and maintain Arabic speech data pipelines — audio sourcing, normalization, diacritization, quality filtering, and manifest generation for model training
• Optimize models for production serving — streaming chunk generation, KV cache tuning, quantization, and batched inference for low-latency Arabic TTS and ASR
• Evaluate and adapt speech-to-speech pipelines — integrating ASR, LLM, and TTS components with attention to end-to-end latency and Arabic conversational quality

What We're Looking For

• Strong foundations in machine learning and deep learning
• Hands-on experience training or fine-tuning neural models — domain matters less than depth
• Comfortable with Python, PyTorch, and the HuggingFace ecosystem
• Able to read research papers and translate ideas into experiments independently
• Clear communicator who can work across research and engineering
• Nice to Have
• Native or fluent Arabic speaker — a real advantage when evaluating synthesis naturalness and dialect quality
• Prior work with speech or audio models (ASR, TTS, speaker verification, codec, VAD, enhancement, or similar)
• Familiarity with Arabic linguistic structure, diacritization tools, and NLP preprocessing for Arabic
• Experience with inference optimization — quantization, speculative decoding, CUDA kernels, or serving frameworks (vLLM, TensorRT)
• Publications or open-source contributions in speech or audio

What We Offer

• Work at the frontier of Arabic voice AI — a genuinely underserved, high-impact area
• Direct influence on product and research direction
• Small, focused team — your work ships and matters
• Competitive compensation and remote flexibility