Senior Research Engineer

About LILT

LILT was founded by Spence and John, who met at Google working on Google Translate and saw the need for better AI-powered translation in the enterprise. Since 2015, LILT has focused on building cutting-edge language technology, investing early in Large Language Models to improve translation quality and meet the demands of global organizations.

Today, LILT’s Contextual AI Engine, Connector APIs, and Human Adaptive Feedback deliver accurate, nuanced translation across text, video, and speech in 100+ languages. Integrated with 100+ business systems, LILT helps enterprises scale global growth and deliver seamless multilingual experiences. We are trusted by Intel Corporation

, Canva

, the United States Department of Defense

, the United States Air Force

, ASICS

, and hundreds of global Enterprises. LILT is backed by visionary investors including Intel Capital

, Sequoia Capital

, and Redpoint

.

The Research Team at Lilt

We’re looking for a Senior Research Engineer to join our Research & Engineering team, with a focus on Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), and open-source systems (OSS).

We are seeking a highly skilled Technical Research Engineer to design, develop, and productionize cutting-edge OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) systems leveraging open-source (OSS) models. In this role, you will design, develop, and deploy production-grade prototypes that leverage open-source AI models to solve complex real-world challenges — including poor-quality audio and noisy, uncontrolled recording environments. You’ll collaborate closely with our applied research scientists, product engineers, and linguists to push the boundaries of what’s possible in document and speech understanding.

Where You’ll Work

This position can be based out of our Berlin, Germany office and will be expected to work in the office in a hybrid capacity. Additional locations include the Washington D.C. metropolitan area where you will start as fully remote and then transition to hybrid once offices are opened in those locations.

Authorization to work in the US and/or Germany is a precondition of employment.

What You’ll Do

We are seeking a highly skilled Technical Research Engineer to design, develop, and productionize cutting-edge OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) systems leveraging open-source (OSS) models. You will work on challenging real-world problems, including building robust pipelines for poor-quality audio, multi-speaker scenarios, and complex noise environments. Your work will directly advance the capabilities of speech and text recognition systems in demanding, uncontrolled conditions.

Skills and Experience

• Prototype Development: Design and implement production-grade prototypes for OCR and ASR systems based on open-source models.

• Audio Robustness Engineering: Build ASR systems resilient to severe audio challenges such as low/high volume, distortions, overlapping speech, unknown speaker counts, and off-axis microphone placement.

• Model Post-Training: Fine-tune and post-train ASR and OCR models for domain-specific accuracy improvements.

• Speaker Identification: Develop robust OSS-based solutions for accurately identifying speakers in multi-speaker environments.

• Noise Identification: Create systems capable of detecting both speech and environmental noises (e.g., rattling keys, doors closing) within recordings.

• Speaker Separation: Implement pipelines to isolate and export individual speaker audio into separate files.

• Speech Segmentation: Engineer accurate segmentation of speech into logical and temporal units for downstream processing.

Qualifications

• Strong proficiency in Python and experience with popular OSS machine learning frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow).

• Hands-on experience with ASR/OCR open-source toolkits (e.g., Kaldi, Vosk, Whisper, Tesseract).

• Deep understanding of speech signal processing and noise-robust ASR techniques.

• Familiarity with speaker diarization, source separation, and audio preprocessing methods.

• Experience in deploying production-grade ML systems at scale.

• Strong problem-solving skills and ability to work with ambiguous, noisy datasets.

Preferred

• Background in computational linguistics, speech technology, or related fields.

• Contributions to OSS speech/OCR projects.

• Knowledge of GPU acceleration and optimization for training/inference.

Our Story

Our founders, Spence and John met at Google working on Google Translate. As researchers at Stanford and Berkeley, they both worked on language technology to make information accessible to everyone. They were amazed to learn that Google Translate wasn’t used for enterprise products and services inside the company and left to start a new company to address this need – LILT.

At its core, LILT has always been a machine learning company since its incorporation on March 6, 2015. At the time, machine translation didn’t meet the quality standard for enterprise translations, so LILT assembled a cutting-edge research team tasked with closing that gap. While meeting customer demand for translation services, LILT has prioritized investments in Large Language Models, believing that this foundation was imperative to the future of enterprise translation.

US Benefits:

• Compensation: At market salary, meaningful equity, 401(k) matching, and flexible time off plus company holidays

• Medical Benefits: Employees receive coverage of medical, dental, and vision insurance, plus FSA/DFSA, HSA, and Commuter benefits. In addition, LILT pays for basic life insurance, short-term disability, and long-term disability

• Paid parental leave is provided after 6 months.

• Monthly lifestyle benefit stipend via the Fringe platform to allow employees to customize benefits to their lifestyle

LILT in the News

• List #52 in The Software Report’s

Top 100 Software Companies!

• LILT makes it onto the Inc. 5000 List

.

• AI Day Spring 2025 Webinar

"Revolutionizing Content with AI Agents."

• LILT's co-founder John Denero, and employees Joern Wuebker and Thomas Zenkel, were approved for U.S. Patent

for their neural word alignment process, significantly advances machine translation by preserving formatting accuracy.

• Check out all our news on our website

.

Information collected and processed as part of your application process, including any job applications you choose to submit, is subject to LILT's Privacy Policy at https://lilt.com/legal/privacy_

.

At LILT, we are committed to a fair, inclusive, and transparent hiring process. As part of our recruitment efforts, we may use artificial intelligence (AI) and automated tools to assist in the evaluation of applications, including résumé screening, assessment scoring, and interview analysis. These tools are designed to support human decision-making and help us identify qualified candidates efficiently and objectively. All final hiring decisions are made by people. If you have any concerns, require accommodations, or would like to opt-out of the use of AI in our hiring process, please let us know at recruiting@lilt.com.

LILT is an equal opportunity employer. We extend equal opportunity to all individuals without regard to an individual’s race, religion, color, national origin, ancestry, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic characteristics, veteran or marital status, pregnancy, or any other classification protected by applicable local, state or federal laws. We are committed to the principles of fair employment and the elimination of all discriminatory practices.