Senior AI/ML Engineer, Audio and NLP
Arlington, VA — Hybrid · Full-time
$160,000–$225,000 + bonus + stock options
Teach machines to hear and understand the real world
BluJuniper is an AI and optimization company building advanced software for complex operational environments.
Our engineers work on systems that bring together real-time communications, computer vision, audio intelligence, natural language processing, navigation, geospatial data, optimization, and secure cloud infrastructure.
We are looking for a Senior AI/ML Engineer who wants to build audio, speech, and language models that perform in noisy, unpredictable, real-world conditions, and then get them into production.
What You’ll Build
You may work on capabilities that:
- Transcribe speech accurately in noisy, fast-moving environments.
- Detect and classify important audio events.
- Extract meaning, intent, and entities from spoken and written language.
- Run as low-latency production inference pipelines.
- Feed live insights into applications used for real-time decisions.
The Role
You will own models from research through production: data, fine-tuning, evaluation, metrics, and inference.
You will work with backend, mobile, and product engineers to turn model output into reliable features.
Responsibilities
- Develop audio, speech, and NLP models using Whisper and transformer architectures.
- Fine-tune models on domain-specific data.
- Design evaluation frameworks and metrics for model quality.
- Build production inference pipelines with low latency.
- Curate and manage training and evaluation datasets.
- Collaborate with engineers to integrate models into applications.
Required Qualifications
- 5+ years of professional machine learning experience.
- Strong experience with speech, audio, or NLP models.
- Experience with Whisper and/or transformer-based models.
- Strong Python and PyTorch skills.
- Experience fine-tuning and evaluating models.
- Experience deploying models to production.
- Legally authorized to work in the United States.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with streaming or real-time speech recognition.
- Experience with audio event detection or speaker diarization.
- Experience optimizing inference with ONNX, TensorRT, or quantization.
- Experience with LLMs and retrieval systems.
- Experience in defense, public safety, or high-security environments.
Why This Role Is Different
Your models will not sit in a notebook. They will run in live applications, in difficult acoustic conditions, supporting people making critical decisions.
What Success Looks Like
Success means models that measurably improve, ship reliably to production, and hold up when real-world audio gets messy.
Compensation
The base salary range for this position is $160,000–$225,000 per year, depending on experience, qualifications, and other relevant factors.
Eligible employees may also receive performance bonuses and stock options in addition to base salary.
Location
This is a hybrid role based in Arlington, VA.
Benefits
Eligible employees receive:
- Health, dental, and vision coverage.
- Performance bonus opportunities.
- Stock options.
- Flexible work environment.
- Significant technical ownership.
- Direct influence over product and architecture decisions.
- Opportunities to work across AI/ML, distributed systems, computer vision, audio, NLP, navigation, optimization, and real-time infrastructure.
- A collaborative engineering environment with direct visibility into company and product strategy.
Work Authorization and Clearance Eligibility
Candidates must be legally authorized to work in the United States. An active U.S. government security clearance is not required for this role, but candidates who currently hold or have previously held a clearance are encouraged to note it in their application.
Certain customer, contractual, or regulatory requirements may require additional eligibility verification.
Equal Opportunity Employer
BluJuniper is an equal opportunity employer. We consider qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected under applicable law.
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