Head of Data Engineering

About the role

Join Gradium as Head of Data Engineering to architect the engine powering the next generation of voice. You will lead our "data factory," bridging frontier research with production-grade scale to make natural, real-time, and emotional voice the global default.

Responsibilities

• Architecting Foundational Audio Infrastructure: Design and build the high-throughput data backbone required to train unified, audio-native models at scale.

• Engineering the Research-to-Prod Flywheel: Build the infrastructure that rapidly transforms breakthrough generative audio research into production-grade, low-latency APIs.

• Strategic Data Partnership: Collaborate with Founders and Research Scientists to define data requirements for capturing human-like prosody, emotion, and multilingual nuances.

• Large-Scale Acoustic Refinement: Implement automated, hands-on pipelines for acoustic cleaning, normalization, and augmentation tailored for transformer architectures.

• Active Learning & Curation Systems: Build advanced tools for automated audio-text alignment and intelligent dataset curation to maximize model ROI.

• Strategic QA & Gap Analysis: Lead deep-dive data validations to identify and fill critical gaps in global linguistic and acoustic coverage.

Qualifications

• Deep AI/ML Heritage: 8+ years of experience in data engineering or machine learning, with a proven track record in AI-first organizations (e.g., Tier-1 tech labs or high-growth GenAI startups).

• Audio & Multimodal Expertise: Strong intuition for audio signal processing and NLP. You understand the nuances of phonetics, prosody, and the specific challenges of tokenizing audio for foundational models.

• Research-to-Production Bridge: Proven ability to work alongside world-class Founding Scientists to translate frontier research into scalable, industrial data pipelines and solutions.

• Strategic Data Acquisition: Experience in building a "data moat" by identifying and securing high-value, diverse datasets across multiple languages and emotional contexts while maintaining a lean, high-quality signal-to-noise ratio.

• Privacy & Ethical Leadership: Expert knowledge of GDPR, PII redaction, and AI ethics, specifically regarding voice cloning and sensitive industries like healthcare.

• Startup Scaling & Leadership: Demonstrated success in building and leading high-performing teams from the ground up in a fast-paced, high-growth environment (Seed to Series B+).

• Product-Minded Engineering: A strategic focus on latency, cost, and reliability, ensuring that data decisions directly support Gradium’s mission of making real-time voice the default interface.