
Staff Research Scientist, Foundational Audio
San Francisco, CAJob$174–252K/yrSeen 1w agoSeen in employer's feed 1w ago
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Job overview
Google Research is building intelligent systems across Google products and supports research spanning fundamental work, product innovation, and infrastructure. The Staff Research Scientist will define and lead research agendas in sequence, speech, audio, and multimodal modeling; optimize models for efficiency and streaming inference; contribute to open-source toolkits; and mentor researchers. The role also involves experiments, prototypes, publications, and collaboration across research teams.
Skills & qualifications
Skills
Qualifications
Full job description
Staff Research Scientist, Foundational Audio
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corporate_fare Google place Mountain View, CA, USA; San Francisco, CA, USA
Mid
Experience driving progress, solving problems, and mentoring more junior team members; deeper expertise and applied knowledge within relevant area.
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info_outline
XApplicants in San Francisco: Qualified applications with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers and the California Fair Chance Act.Note: By applying to this position you will have an opportunity to share your preferred working location from the following: Mountain View, CA, USA; San Francisco, CA, USA .
Minimum qualifications:
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PhD in Computer Science, Linguistics, Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, Physics, a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
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2 years of experience leading a research agenda in sequence, speech, or audio modeling.
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Experience with sequence-to-sequence models across state-space or linear attention, token-free latent representations, speech-text modeling, diffusion, flow-matching, speculative decoding, or streaming alignment.
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Experience with hardware-aware model co-design, scaling laws, memory or cache optimization, or streaming inference latency in JAX, PyTorch, or TensorFlow.
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One or more peer-reviewed publications in machine learning, speech, or audio conferences or journals.
Preferred qualifications:
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10 years of experience in the theoretical and algorithmic aspects of sequence modeling and machine learning research.
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4 years of experience setting research agendas across multiple projects or teams, and publications in NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, JMLR, IEEE Transactions, Nature, Interspeech, ICASSP, or ACL.
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Experience building, scaling, pre-training, and post-training foundational audio, speech, or multimodal models using reinforcement learning alignment or multi-resolution modeling.
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Experience with model compression, distillation, or machine learning acceleration on TPUs or GPUs, and establishing evaluation benchmarks.
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Contributions to open-source machine learning or speech toolkits such as JAX, PyTorch, Hugging Face Transformers, Kaldi, K2, or ESPNet.
About the job
As an organization, Google maintains a portfolio of research projects driven by fundamental research, new product innovation, product contribution and infrastructure goals, while providing individuals and teams the freedom to emphasize specific types of work. As a Research Scientist, you'll setup large-scale tests and deploy promising ideas quickly and broadly, managing deadlines and deliverables while applying the latest theories to develop new and improved products, processes, or technologies. From creating experiments and prototyping implementations to designing new architectures, our research scientists work on real-world problems that span the breadth of computer science, such as machine (and deep) learning, data mining, natural language processing, hardware and software performance analysis, improving compilers for mobile platforms, as well as core search and much more.
As a Research Scientist, you'll also actively contribute to the wider research community by sharing and publishing your findings, with ideas inspired by internal projects as well as from collaborations with research programs at partner universities and technical institutes all over the world.
Google Research is building the next generation of intelligent systems for all Google products. To achieve this, we’re working on projects that utilize the latest computer science techniques developed by skilled software developers and research scientists. Google Research teams collaborate closely with other teams across Google, maintaining the flexibility and versatility required to adapt new projects and foci that meet the demands of the world's fast-paced business needs.
Individual pay is determined by factors including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training.
US: $174000 - $252000 (USD) + 15% bonus target + equity + benefits
Learn more aboutbenefits at Google (https://www.google.com/about/careers/applications/benefits/) .
Responsibilities
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Define and lead research agendas, experimental designs, and evaluation benchmarks in sequence, speech, audio, and multimodal modeling.
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Co-design and optimize models for scaling laws, memory or cache efficiency, distillation, and low-latency streaming inference in JAX, PyTorch, or TensorFlow.
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Contribute to open-source toolkits, and mentor researchers.
Information collected and processed as part of your Google Careers profile, and any job applications you choose to submit is subject to Google'sApplicant and Candidate Privacy Policy (./privacy-policy) .
Google is proud to be an equal opportunity and affirmative action employer. We are committed to building a workforce that is representative of the users we serve, creating a culture of belonging, and providing an equal employment opportunity regardless of race, creed, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, national origin, disability, age, genetic information, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy or related condition (including breastfeeding), expecting or parents-to-be, criminal histories consistent with legal requirements, or any other basis protected by law. See alsoGoogle's EEO Policy (https://www.google.com/about/careers/applications/eeo/) ,Know your rights: workplace discrimination is illegal (https://careers.google.com/jobs/dist/legal/EEOC\_KnowYourRights\_10\_20.pdf) ,Belonging at Google (https://about.google/belonging/) , andHow we hire (https://careers.google.com/how-we-hire/) .
If you have a need that requires accommodation, please let us know by completing ourAccommodations for Applicants form (https://goo.gl/forms/aBt6Pu71i1kzpLHe2) .
Google is a global company and, in order to facilitate efficient collaboration and communication globally, English proficiency is a requirement for all roles unless stated otherwise in the job posting.
To all recruitment agencies: Google does not accept agency resumes. Please do not forward resumes to our jobs alias, Google employees, or any other organization location. Google is not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes.
Equity is granted exclusively and discretionarily by Alphabet Inc. on the basis of an agreement concluded between you and Alphabet Inc. Alphabet Inc. is your sole contractual partner with respect to equity grants. GSU grants are not guaranteed, are discretionary, are subject to approval by the Alphabet Inc. board of directors or its delegate, the terms of the relevant Alphabet Inc. stock plan, and your grant agreement. They have no impact on statutory payments. Current or past grants do not confer an acquired right.
Google is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. See also https://careers.google.com/eeo/ and https://careers.google.com/jobs/dist/legal/OFCCP_EEO_Post.pdf If you have a need that requires accommodation, please let us know by completing our Accommodations for Applicants form: https://goo.gl/forms/aBt6Pu71i1kzpLHe2.
How this job compares
Set against the 2,116 open Research Scientist jobs on Olive Jobs, counted November 12, 2026.
- Pay
- This posting$174–252K/yr
- California median$174–265K/yr473 salary ranges
- US median$138–217K/yr1,497 salary ranges
This range's midpoint, $213K, is 3% below the California median midpoint ($220K) — in the middle half of Research Scientist salary ranges in California.
- Openings
- Olive Jobs lists 662 open Research Scientist jobs in California and 2,116 across the US. 3% of them nationwide are listed as remote or flexible.
- Experience
- This posting asks for at least 2 years of experience; Research Scientist postings that state a minimum ask for 4 years at the median (1,176 postings).
- Education
- 1,075 of the 2,116 open Research Scientist jobs (51%) ask for a bachelor's degree or higher.
Counted across the open, public US postings on Olive Jobs on November 12, 2026. Pay medians are the middle values of the low ends and of the high ends of postings that list both ends of a range in the same cadence (a yearly salary or an hourly rate); a range's midpoint is halfway between its ends. Pay and experience figures resting on fewer than 20 postings are left out.
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