David AI is the first audio data research company. We bring an R&D approach to data–developing datasets with the same rigor AI labs bring to models.

Our mission is to bring AI into the real world, and we believe audio is the gateway. Speech is versatile, accessible, and human—it fits naturally into everyday life. To unlock the full potential of AI, models need more—and better—audio data. That’s where David AI comes in.

David AI was founded in 2024 by a team of former Scale AI engineers and operators. In less than a year, we’ve brought on most FAANG companies and AI labs as customers. We recently raised a $25M Series A from Tier 1 investors like Jack Altman (Alt Capital), Amplify Partners, First Round Capital, Y Combinator, and more.

Our team is sharp, humble, ambitious, and tight-knit–we love spending time together. We’re looking for the best research, engineering, product and operations minds to join us on our mission to revolutionize audio AI.

Role and responsibilities

As a Founding Audio AI Research Engineer, you will drive our research roadmap—shaping strategy, leading model development, and working closely with researchers to deliver high-quality data. You will:

• Develop and publish benchmarks and research to evaluate audio and speech quality, collaborating with academic and industry partners to advance the field and set new standards.
• Work with researchers across leading AI labs and organizations to build out our data roadmap that will enable future speech models and applications.
• Collaborate with our product and operations team to design and conduct experiments that collect high-quality audio data to fuel your cutting-edge research.
• Set strategic and technical direction around our R&D roadmap based on latest research.

Who we're looking for

• Ph.D. or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Electrical Engineering, or a related field with a focus on speech or audio.
• Experience with training and evaluating generative audio models.
• A strong research track record with peer-reviewed publications in leading venues related to speech and audio processing (e.g., Interspeech, ICASSP, NeurIPS, ICML).
• Collaborative mindset and experience leading research agendas with product and other teams.
• Experience in dataset design and conducting empirical analysis of audio data distributions, identifying biases or gaps, and proposing strategies for improved dataset design or collection.
• Research-oriented software engineering skills, including fluency with technologies like PyTorch, TensorFlow, Scikit-learn and Pandas.

Bonus points if you have

• Leadership experience in a research setting.
• Prior startup experience.

Compensation and benefits

• Rapid career growth, at one of the fastest growing Series A companies, within a new and booming industry.
• Competitive salary and equity package.
• Flexible PTO policy.
• Top-notch health, dental, and vision coverage with 100% company reimbursement for most plans.
• Paid lunch and dinner in the office, every day through DoorDash.
• 401k access.