Research Engineer - Voice Intelligence

About the role

Pocket is building a category-defining platform for ambient intelligence. Voice is the highest-signal interface we have — and we’re looking for a research-minded engineer to push what’s possible with voice end-to-end: capture understanding real-time experiences evaluation.

What you'll own

• Invent and ship improvements to our voice stack: diarization, VAD, noise robustness, transcription quality, speaker ID, and post-processing.
• Build new voice-powered product capabilities: better memory, better meeting/voice summaries, better action extraction, better personalization.
• Run tight research loops: define metrics, build eval sets, iterate on models/algorithms, and productionize what works.
• Improve real-time performance and reliability: streaming pipelines, latency budgets, fallbacks, and graceful degradation.
• Partner closely with product + design to translate voice capabilities into features people feel immediately.

What success looks like

• Step-function improvements in voice quality and perceived intelligence (measured and felt).
• A clear evaluation harness (offline + online) that prevents regressions and accelerates iteration.
• Voice features that ship reliably at scale with predictable latency.

What we're looking for

• Have 6–10+ years of experience shipping production systems with strong technical ownership.
• Are strong in applied ML/research engineering and can turn prototypes into robust product.
• Understand audio/voice fundamentals (signal processing basics helpful) and modern model/eval workflows.
• Care deeply about performance and reliability.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience with streaming audio pipelines and real-time systems.
• Experience with LLM post-processing, structured extraction, and evaluation.
• Experience building tooling for labeling, dataset curation, and QA.

What we offer

• Work directly with us and learn fast
• Direct impact on how the company operates day to day
• High-trust, high-responsibility environment
• Competitive compensation

About Pocket

Pocket is a Y Combinator W26 company building a premium hardware plus software product in the AI voice recorder space. We are obsessed with quality and speed. We are scaling very fast in the US and now European markets and building a device experience that can become the category leader.

Compensation Range: $200K - $300K