Speech & Language AI Engineer (Founding Role & Equity Only)
What We're Building
PlotWeaver is building the language and voice infrastructure for global storytelling.
We create AI for dubbing, subtitling, and localisation, starting with African languages and scaling globally. Our goal is to make stories move across cultures without losing meaning, emotion, or identity.
This is not a feature. This is infrastructure.
The Role
We are looking for a Speech & Language AI Engineer to join PlotWeaver as a founding team member.
You will own the intelligence layer of the platform, how the system listens, understands, translates, and speaks.
This is a deep technical role with real ownership. You are not tuning a model. You are building a system.
What You Will Do
- Train and fine-tune TTS models for African and multilingual speech
- Build speaker adaptation and voice cloning pipelines
- Improve naturalness, accent fidelity and pronunciation
- Adapt ASR models for African accents and low-resource languages
- Build diarisation, alignment and subtitle segmentation
- Build and improve translation and localisation pipelines
- Handle slang, idioms and cultural variation
- Define quality metrics and evaluation pipeline
What We're Looking For
- Strong experience in speech, NLP or applied ML
- Comfort working across ASR, TTS and translation
- Experience with low-resource or multilingual models is a plus
- Builder mindset and comfort with ambiguity
- Currently on a PhD programme, hold a PhD or have equivalent research experience in ASR, TTS, MT or a closely related field
Tech We Care About:
- PyTorch or TensorFlow
- VITS, XTTS, Bark, FastSpeech, Glow-TTS
- Whisper, NeMo, wav2vec2
- Marian, NLLB, mBART, OpenNMT
- Alignment, phonetics, tokenisation, segmentation
Why PlotWeaver
PlotWeaver is building digital public infrastructure for African languages.
We work with leading universities and linguistics experts across Africa, South America, the US, and Canada to build the largest high-quality African speech and text datasets ever created.
Our research is designed for production and for contribution to the field, with work presented at ACL, NeurIPS and EMNLP.
We have a formal MoU with the Nigerian Film Corporation for nationwide rollout of AI-assisted filmmaking tools. We are members of NVIDIA Inception and already working with creators, studios and institutions.
What We Offer
- Equity:Founder-level equity
- Vesting: 4-year vesting with 1-year cliff
- Salary: Post-fundraising
- Direct ownership of architecture, culture and direction