Overview

In this role you will design, build, and evaluate speech language models for spoken response understanding and automated scoring, supporting learner-facing practice and hiring-facing assessments. You will work with cross-functional teams to deliver accurate, fair, and scalable speech AI that provides real-time feedback and robust evaluation. You will lead end-to-end assessment design and ensure responsible AI practices across accents, dialects, and proficiency levels. This position offers the chance to shape practical, high-stakes language assessment products in production.

Responsabilidades

- Design and improve speech language models for understanding pronunciation, fluency, prosody, and communicative effectiveness
- Develop and evaluate automated scoring and feedback pipelines for speaking tasks (learner-facing and hiring-facing)
- Train, fine-tune, and evaluate acoustic, cascading, speech-to-speech, speech LMs, and scoring models (neural and LLM-based)
- Design experiments and analyze performance, reliability, and validity of assessments
- Perform error analysis and reliability studies to guide model and product improvements
- Collaborate with product, UX, and assessment scientists to integrate models into interactive experiences
- Apply responsible AI to ensure fairness and transparency of feedback and scores
- Support model monitoring and governance in production for high-stakes use




- Act as technical lead for an AI conversational assessment product and translate goals into design decisions
- Shape end-to-end conversational assessment design including prompts, turn-taking, scoring logic, and feedback timing
- Balance validity, user experience, latency, and scalability in production designs

Requisitos principales

- Master’s or PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Speech & Language Processing, Applied Linguistics, Language Assessment, or equivalent applied experience
- Hands-on experience building speech recognition, spoken language understanding, or automated scoring systems
- Strong Python programming with PyTorch or similar ML frameworks for speech and language modeling
- Solid grounding in machine learning, statistics, and experimental design as applied to model evaluation
- Experience with modern neural speech models and large language models, including fine-tuning for spoken tasks
- Expertise in evaluation metrics for speech and assessment (accuracy, reliability, validity, fairness)
- Familiarity with responsible AI practices, including bias analysis, interpretability, and governance
- Strong communication skills to explain model behavior and assessment outcomes to both technical and non-technical audiences
- Experience working in cross-functional product teams and shipping ML systems to production

- strong communication
- cross-functional collaboration
- problem-solving mindset
- Python
- PyTorch
- speech recognition

📌 Lead Specialist, AI Scientist (La Coruña)
🏢 Pearson
📍 La Coruña