Six Figure Work

Principal Research & Engineering, Realtime Voice AI

Inflection AI

Company websiteinflection.ai (Inflection AI, opens in new tab)

Base salary $400K  to $550K

Employer-published annual base salary, USD. Advertised base range in Palo Alto, CA

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  • LocationPalo Alto, CA
  • WorkplaceWorkplace not stated
  • Status at last checkSource accepting applications when checked
  • Last checked (3 h ago) · observed since

About this job

About Inflection AI

Inflection AI is a Public Benefit Corporation empowering people with human-centered, emotionally intelligent AI. We’re shaping the future of AI by combining emotional intelligence (EQ) and raw intelligence (IQ) to elevate people’s potential.

Inflection AI created Pi, the world’s first emotionally intelligent AI, to help people work through decisions, emotions, and challenges. Pi is a personal AI agent powered by Inflection AI’s foundation model, proving that AI can be personal, empathetic, and contextually aware.

About the Role

Voice is becoming the highest-stakes interface for AI, where quality depends on speed, naturalness, interruption handling, emotional nuance, and reliability in real-world conditions. We are looking for a hands-on technical leader to define and build Inflection’s realtime Voice AI stack across speech models, streaming systems, voice-agent runtime, and evaluation. This person will help shape how emotionally intelligent AI shows up in spoken interactions, partnering across research, engineering, product, and design to deliver voice agents that feel responsive, trustworthy, and useful in enterprise settings.

What You’ll Do

  • Establish the technical roadmap for Inflection's realtime Voice AI stack, encompassing streaming ASR, TTS, speech-to-speech, speech LLMs, turn-taking, barge-in, latency, and reliability.
  • Utilize a 1,000 GPU cluster to support performance benchmarking and extensive experimentation.
  • Determine build-vs-buy-vs-train strategies for core audio, speech, and realtime interaction components.
  • Direct research and engineering efforts focused on speech quality, naturalness, expressiveness, emotional fit, controllability, and production readiness.
  • Collaborate with infrastructure, product, design, and agentic AI teams to deploy voice agents for enterprise workflows.
  • Develop evaluation systems measuring voice quality through metrics such as clarity, emotional appropriateness, interruption handling, task success, user preference, latency, and reliability, moving beyond standard WER.
  • Refine production voice behavior by debugging across runtime, model, evaluation, data, and product layers.
  • Mentor, and Coach a team specializing in speech research, audio infrastructure, realtime systems, and evaluation.


What We’re Looking For

  • Experience leading or serving as a principal Research and Engineering contributor to realtime voice, speech, audio AI, or conversational AI systems in production.
  • Experience with one or more of: streaming ASR, TTS, speech-to-speech systems, speech LLMs, audio tokenization, multimodal models, barge-in, low-latency inference, or realtime agents.
  • Strong technical judgment across both speech modeling and production systems.
  • Ability to define voice quality in terms of user and customer outcomes, not only offline model metrics.
  • Experience designing or using evaluation systems that capture real user experience.
  • Strong product intuition for natural, trustworthy, emotionally appropriate voice interactions.
  • Ability to lead senior technical talent while staying close to the code, architecture, and debugging work.
  • Have a bachelor’s degree or equivalent in a related field to the offered position requirements

Employee Pay Disclosures

At Inflection AI, we aim to attract and retain the best employees and compensate them in a way that appropriately and fairly values their individual contributions to the company. For this role, Inflection AI estimates a starting annual base salary to fall within the range of $400,000 to $550,000, depending on a candidate’s qualifications and level of experience. This role also includes a meaningful equity component, allowing employees to share in the long-term success of the company.

Benefits

Inflection AI values and supports our team’s mental, emotional, financial and physical health. We are focused on building a positive, safe, inclusive and inspiring place to work. Our benefits include: 

  • Robust medical, dental and vision options with employer contributions for HSA, FSA and DFSA
  • 401k matching program 
  • Flexible Time Off, 10 paid holidays, 5 days sick leave
  • Parental, Medical and Family care leave 
  • Generous cell-phone, wellness and office set up stipends 
  • Support of country-specific visa needs for international employees living in the Bay Area

Source: Inflection AI on Greenhouse · View original posting (opens in new tab)

Pay in context

This role's base floor ($400,000) is above 97% of the 1,729 Data & ML roles in California listed on this site; 3 others list the same floor. Their median floor is $184,000; the middle half runs from $154,000 to $224,000.

Only jobs on this site count, and each one publishes a base salary of $100,000 or more, so this compares six-figure jobs with each other, not with the whole market. Computed Nov 8, 2026.

This range next to 3 other live Inflection AI roles with the nearest advertised base floor
Chart as a table
This range next to 3 other live Inflection AI roles with the nearest advertised base floor
RolePublished base
Principal Research & Engineering, Realtime Voice AI (this listing)$400K - $550K
Principal Research Engineer, Model Training & Post-Training$400K - $550K
Principal Engineer, Agentic AI Systems$400K - $550K
Staff Engineer, Agentic$350K - $500K

Same $100K to $400K scale as every card. All Inflection AI roles · How to read the bar

Observed changes

  1. First observed on the employer's board
  2. Began meeting the published-salary criteria
Observed since
Employer-stated posting date
2026-06-29
Where this pay comes from

Location as the employer wrote it: Palo Alto, California, United States

d fairly values their individual contributions to the company. For this role, Inflection AI estimates a starting annual base salary to fall within the range of $400,000 to $550,000, depending on a candidate’s qualifications and level of exp

Method
Employer text, read with fixed rules and re-verified
Checked
Rule set
us-base-v2

The pay passage appears in the employer's own job text. Fixed, deterministic rules located it, and the passage below was checked against the stored copy of the posting.

What we verified

  • The pay figures come from the employer's own listing, quoted exactly above.
  • The pay is an annual base salary in US dollars with a minimum of at least $100,000.
  • The role was publicly listed on the employer's job board when last checked.

We do not verify what the employer will actually offer, whether the employer is still recruiting for the role, or anything beyond what the employer published. Full methodology.

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