Audio Engineer

About David AI

At David AI, our vision is to bring impactful AI into billions of lives through voice. Our mission is to help the world's leading AI companies build better voice models and agents. We're building the data and evaluation infrastructure behind those models.

Founded in 2024, we're a fast-growing Series B company backed by NVIDIA, Meritech, First Round, YC, and others, with ~70 people across San Francisco and New York City.

About this role

You'll be David AI's in-house audio expert. When a contributor's recordings sound off, a program needs a recording spec, or we're setting up a studio session, you're the person who knows exactly what's wrong and how to fix it. You'll set the audio standards everyone else works from, help contributors and vendors get their setups right, and run the hardware and studio side of our in-person recording work. You'll report to the Head of Operations.

In this role, you will:

• Be the go-to audio authority for Ops, Engineering, and ML, answering the "why does this sound wrong?" questions that nobody else can
• Define audio quality standards and recording specs (noise floor, clipping, reverb, levels, mic placement, sample rate/format) for each program
• Help contributors diagnose and fix their home recording setups, including mic choice, placement, gain staging, room treatment, and interface/software settings
• Write clear setup guides, onboarding checks, and troubleshooting docs that non-experts can follow in any of our ~20 language markets
• Lead a team and calibrate them to the company's audio standards. Listen to problem batches, identify root causes (environment, hardware, settings, processing), and recommend fixes
• Define acoustic targets for processed, synthetic, or AI-generated audio, and judge whether output meets them
• Work with ML researchers to identify and define audio events and acoustic quality issues (What counts as “muffled” audio? How do we define “robotic artifacts”?).
• Turn these definitions into actionable guidelines for our expert audio QAs to label internal audio data.
• Manage the QA team in a rapid iteration loop of labeling audio samples, getting feedback from ML researchers, and refining the annotation process to deliver high-quality training and eval sets.
• Conduct quality audits on annotation and post-processing models before they land in production.

Your background looks like

• 7+ years in audio engineering, recording, or production (studio, broadcast, podcast, post, or voice work)
• A highly trained ear for subtle differences across voices, mics, rooms, and signal chains
• Deep hands-on knowledge of mics, interfaces, preamps, acoustics, and room treatment
• Strong DAW skills and fluency with loudness/metering, EQ, dynamics, noise reduction, and restoration tools (e.g., iZotope RX)
• Ability to troubleshoot remotely and explain fixes clearly to non-technical people
• Comfortable in a fast-moving startup: ambiguous problems, shifting priorities, high ownership

Bonus points if you have

• Experience with speech or voice data for AI (TTS, ASR, SFT projects) at a lab or data vendor
• Experience recording voice actors or directing dialogue sessions
• Experience supporting remote or distributed recording at scale
• Scripting basics (Python, ffmpeg, SoX) for batch checks or processing
• Multilingual

Benefits

• Unlimited PTO.
• Top-notch health, dental, and vision coverage with 100% coverage for most plans.
• FSA & HSA access.
• 401k access.
• Meals 2x daily through DoorDash + snacks and beverages available at the office.
• Unlimited company-sponsored Barry's classes.

Visas

We sponsor international candidates across several visa types, including H-1B transfers, H-1B1, O-1, E-3, and TN. We also hire candidates on STEM OPT. If you’re on OPT, we’ll want to confirm you have a path to one of the visas listed above before your OPT ends. While we can’t guarantee any individual outcome, we’ve successfully sponsored teammates from all over the world.