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 (Vigo)
🏢 Pearson
📍 Vigo