- Clera
- San Francisco, CA
- Full-Time
- 23 days ago
ASR Engineer.
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ASR Engineer: our view in 3 lines...
- The Role:This role is for an engineer building and improving a cloud-based ASR system with a small on-device component for an early-stage ambient intelligence consumer startup.
- The Person:The person will build, tune, debug, and ship improvements to the transcription pipeline, owning quality and reliability across data, training, evaluation, deployment, and production debugging.
- Requirements:The role calls for 3+ years building and tuning transcription or ASR pipelines in production, hands-on experience with latency-sensitive or streaming audio pipelines, on-device or embedded ML experience, and experience building agent or LLM-based product features.
About the role
About the Role
You'll own the transcription pipeline end-to-end at an early-stage ambient intelligence consumer startup — a cloud-based ASR system with a narrowly scoped on-device component. As one of the company's first US engineering hires, you'll work hands-on with senior product and business leadership to build, tune, debug, and ship pipeline improvements directly.
What You'll Do
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Build and iterate on the cloud-based ASR pipeline, from audio capture through post-processing, in production at scale.
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Own ASR quality and reliability end-to-end, shipping measurable improvements across latency, small-word accuracy, and voice-print reliability.
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Work across data, training/fine-tuning, evaluation, and deployment to translate product feedback into shipped pipeline changes.
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Collaborate closely with overseas R&D, hardware, and supply-chain teams across time zones.
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Partner with a product-focused backend engineer on shared pipeline surfaces.
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Operate with minimal specification, turning lightweight asks into concrete, production-ready improvements.
What We're Looking For
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3+ years building and tuning transcription/ASR pipelines end-to-end in production, primarily in cloud-based settings.
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Demonstrated ownership of production ASR systems through the full lifecycle: data preparation, model training/fine-tuning, evaluation, and deployment.
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Hands-on experience with latency-sensitive or streaming audio/ASR pipelines.
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Track record of shipping pipeline improvements from design through deployment based on real production usage data.
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Comfort debugging transcription quality issues (small-word accuracy, voice-print reliability, latency) in live systems.
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Experience in early-stage or founding engineering environments — ships without large team support or fully-specified requirements.
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On-device or embedded ML experience (Core ML, TensorFlow Lite, or similar frameworks).
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Prior experience building wearable, hardware, or robotics device products.
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Background at an AI-native consumer application focused on transcription or audio.
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Experience building agent or LLM-based product features (tool use, memory, retrieval systems).
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Cares how transcription feels to use — not just how it benchmarks — and makes latency/accuracy tradeoffs independently.
Compensation & Benefits
Base salary $150,000 – $200,000 USD annually. Visa sponsorship is not available for this role.
Location
Hybrid (3 days/week in office) — San Francisco Bay Area, California, USA.
