Senior Speech Scientist / Conversational AI Analyst

We are seeking a Senior Speech Scientist / Conversational AI Analyst to support the migration, testing, evaluation, and optimization of an enterprise-scale Intelligent Virtual Assistant (IVA) built on Google Conversational AI technologies. The ideal candidate will bring expertise in speech recognition, conversational AI, analytics, and customer experience, helping transform legacy IVR journeys into modern AI-powered interactions. This role will partner with Product, Engineering, Operations, Data, Risk, and Compliance teams to improve conversational performance, automation effectiveness, and customer outcomes within a regulated financial-services environment. Responsibilities - Analyze production audio, transcripts, speech-recognition outputs, confidence scores, and customer utterances to identify ASR, NLU, and conversational performance improvement opportunities. - Evaluate and optimize speech-recognition accuracy across accents, dialects, languages, audio conditions, channels, and customer segments, while improving metrics such as word error rate, semantic accuracy, intent recognition, entity extraction, task completion, and containment. - Develop and refine intents, entities, training phrases, utterance taxonomies, annotation standards, speech adaptation strategies, and routing logic to improve conversational experiences. - Design, execute, and maintain evaluation datasets, test suites, and validation frameworks covering standard use cases, edge cases, adversarial inputs, out-of-domain scenarios, and high-risk customer interactions. - Assess deterministic NLU, generative AI, hybrid conversational architectures, prompts, grounding, workflow orchestration, and AI behaviors, including hallucination, bias, safety, compliance, and policy adherence. - Perform root-cause analysis of conversational failures across speech recognition, NLU, prompts, business rules, integrations, orchestration, and backend systems, translating findings into actionable recommendations. - Support migration of legacy IVR, grammar-based speech systems, and conversational assets into Google Conversational AI platforms, establishing baselines, acceptance criteria, testing strategies, and post-launch monitoring. - Lead conversational testing, experimentation, A/B testing, regression testing, pilot validations, performance monitoring, dashboards, scorecards, and reporting to measure and communicate business outcomes. - Partner with Product, Engineering, Operations, Analytics, Risk, Compliance, Legal, and Privacy teams to deliver secure, compliant, customer-friendly conversational solutions while maintaining governance documentation, datasets, models, releases, and audit artifacts. - 5+ years of experience in Speech Recognition, Conversational AI, NLU, Speech Analytics, Contact Center Analytics, Computational Linguistics, or a related discipline. - Hands-on experience analyzing speech-recognition outputs, customer utterances, transcripts, intents, entities, and conversational failure patterns. - Strong understanding of ASR concepts, including word error rate, confidence scoring, endpointing, language modeling, acoustic variability, and speech adaptation techniques. - Experience evaluating NLU systems usg metrics such as precision, recall, F1 score, confusion matrices, intent accuracy, entity accuracy, and out-of-domain detection. - Experience with enterprise IVR, voicebot, chatbot, IVA, or contact-center technologies. - Experience creating annotation standards, labeled datasets, test utterances, scorecards, and regression testing frameworks. - Strong SQL skills and proficiency in Python, R, or another analytical scripting language. - Experience with data analytics, visualization, and reporting tools such as Power BI, Tableau, Looker, or equivalent platforms. - Ability to analyze large datasets, identify trends, and translate insights into actionable business and product recommendations. - Excellent communication, presentation, stakeholder-management, and cross-functional collaboration skills. - Experience working within Agile or SAFe delivery environments. Nice To Have - Master’s degree or PhD in Computational Linguistics, Speech Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, or a related field. - Experience with Google Conversational AI technologies (CCAI, Dialogflow CX, Agent Assist, Speech-to-Text, Text-to-Speech) and migrating legacy IVR or NLU platforms to modern conversational AI solutions. - Knowledge of LLMs, prompt engineering, RAG, grounding, tool calling, generative AI evaluation, and conversational AI optimization practices. - Experience with contact center platforms such as Five9, Genesys, Nuance, Avaya, Amazon Connect, or similar technologies, preferably within financial services or other regulated industries. - Familiarity with compliance and accessibility requirements, multilingual conversational experiences, and technical concepts such as APIs, JSON, cloud logging, telemetry, CI/CD, and automated testing frameworks.