Senior Audio AI Engineer - TTS / Speech Synthesis

At Awarri, our mission is to enable the development and adoption of frontier technology across Africa, starting in Nigeria. We are building inclusive AI technologies-from LLMs to speech models-that reflect and empower African languages and cultural contexts.

Why Join Awarri?

• Be part of a pioneering initiative shaping the future of AI in Africa.
• Work on impactful projects that center real-world representation and inclusivity.
• Collaborate with a passionate, globally distributed team of engineers, linguists, and researchers.

As a Senior Audio AI Engineer at Awarri, you will play a pivotal role in advancing the naturalness and quality of our Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems, focused on African languages and accents. We're seeking an engineer who understands the intricacies of prosody, rhythm, and speech alignment-and is excited to push the boundaries of audio AI in a meaningful cultural context.

This role is best suited for a specialist with deep experience in speech technologies and a passion for building expressive, production-ready TTS models. You'll be joining a collaborative, mission-driven team dedicated to shaping the future of generative audio systems in Africa.

Responsibilities Model Development & Fine-Tuning

• Optimize neural TTS models for prosody, pacing, and expressiveness (e.g., Tacotron 2, FastSpeech 2, Glow-TTS, VITS).
• Improve duration prediction and phoneme-to-frame alignment using forced aligners or prosody-aware training.
• Incorporate punctuation and linguistic markers into the model pipeline to improve natural flow.
• Implement and fine-tune transformer-based architectures for speech synthesis and text-to-speech tasks.

Audio Engineering & Vocoder Optimization

• Evaluate and fine-tune neural vocoders (e.g., HiFi-GAN, WaveGlow) to match desired voice characteristics and audio quality.
• Identify and correct audio artifacts or inconsistencies in generated speech.
• Optimize speech processing pipelines for efficiency and real-time performance.

Evaluation & Iteration

• Lead both objective (e.g., duration errors, pitch contours) and subjective (e.g., MOS scoring) evaluations of TTS quality.
• Collaborate with linguistic teams to benchmark pronunciation accuracy in Nigerian languages.
• Develop automated testing frameworks to validate speech synthesis quality at scale.

Deployment & Production Readiness

• Prepare the TTS system for product integration by improving inference speed and robustness.
• Support the deployment of models across various platforms (cloud, mobile, embedded).
• Optimize model inference using VLLM for efficient deployment.
• Build APIs and backend services for TTS deployment using FastAPI and Flask.
• Implement and manage data pipelines and storage solutions using MongoDB and MySQL.

Technical Skills & Requirements

• Proficiency in Python and TypeScript for model development and backend integration.
• Experience with transformer-based models for speech synthesis and NLP.
• Strong background in machine learning frameworks such as TensorFlow or PyTorch.
• Experience in designing scalable AI-driven applications.
• Familiarity with FastAPI, Flask, and cloud-based deployment environments.
• Knowledge of database management using MongoDB and MySQL.

Your Experience Technical Expertise

• 3+ years of experience developing and deploying TTS or speech generation systems (bonus for low-resource languages).
• Deep knowledge of at least one neural TTS architecture and related vocoders.
• Proficiency with PyTorch, TensorFlow, or JAX for building and training models.
• Experience with audio processing tools (e.g., librosa, Praat, torchaudio).

Linguistic & Cultural Sensitivity

• Experience working with multilingual or low-resource speech data.
• Familiarity with phonetics/phonology, especially as it relates to prosody and rhythm.

Engineering Workflow

• Experience building scalable training and evaluation pipelines.
• Ability to debug complex model behavior and iterate quickly toward product quality.
• Comfort working remotely and asynchronously with interdisciplinary teams.

Nice to Have

• Prior work on African language speech systems or expressive TTS in non-English languages.
• Interest in linguistic or cultural technology in the African context.
• Contributions to open-source TTS or audio AI tools.
• Experience with emotion modeling or speaker adaptation.