Namecoach/Euphonia | Founding Voice AI Engineer
- Role: Founding Voice AI Engineer (Part-time, path to CAIO)
- Location: SF or Remote
- Employment Type: Contract / Part-time (Potential to convert to Full-time)
- Compensation: ~$30-120/hr (based on seniority)
- Source: Hacker News
About the Company
Namecoach has spent 10 years building the largest verified pronunciation dataset of its kind, featuring ~2M self-recorded name pronunciations and a large corpus of human-verified phonetic spellings.
We are currently building Euphonia, a provider-neutral middleware layer that enables TTS engines to correctly pronounce names, acronyms, and other out-of-vocabulary terms. While modern TTS models (OpenAI, ElevenLabs, etc.) sound excellent, they lack phoneme-level control. Euphonia sits in front of these engines to provide the necessary corrections.
About the Role
This is a 0 to 1 founding voice AI engineering role with a genuine path to Chief AI Officer for the right candidate.
- Technical Focus: You will work with deep speech and phonetics, including grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P), IPA, and ASR/TTS internals.
- Responsibilities: Build and evaluate models, specifically focusing on recognition and G2P.
- Tooling: You should be comfortable shipping with agentic dev tools like Claude Code and Cursor.
- Schedule: Flexible hours, with approximately 2 hours/day of overlap with US Pacific time.
- Process: Includes a paid take-home assignment and a paid trial month before any long-term commitment.
- Company Status: Series A closed, bridge to B in motion.
Requirements
- Deep expertise in speech and phonetics.
- Experience with G2P, IPA, and ASR/TTS internals.
- Ability to build and evaluate models.
- Proficiency with modern agentic development tools.
How to Apply
View the full job description here: Wellfound
To apply, email hiring+hn@name-coach.com with:
- A short note on what interests you about the role.
- A link to something you have built.
- Note: Candidates with open-source work in G2P, TTS, or ASR will be prioritized.