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Salary: USD 161,300 - 274,200 / annual
ServiceNow is seeking a Senior Machine Learning Engineer with deep expertise in linguistics and speech to join its Voice AI platform team. In this role, you will contribute to the design, development, and implementation of Voice AI applications, bringing linguistic and speech expertise to core platform components including Speech Recognition, Conversation Management, and Speech Generation.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own language support end-to-end: add new languages and locales, maintain language-specific instructions, normalization rules, and pronunciation guidelines
- Analyze complex speech problems across diverse languages, accents, and dialects
- Collaborate with linguists to map the problem space for specific languages
- Diagnose language and speech failures in production, trace root causes, and drive fixes with engineering teams
- Partner with engineers to identify and solve linguistic problems, contributing code to user-facing features
- Work with product managers to understand customer use cases and linguistic challenges
- Design linguistic experiments to inform technology choices (STT/TTS models and vendors)
- Build tooling (with AI assistance) to analyze linguistic problems at scale
- Mentor colleagues and promote knowledge-sharing across linguistics and Voice AI engineering disciplines
You will work within ServiceNow's distributed work model with flexible work personas; this role is based in Santa Clara with hybrid flexibility.
Requirements:
- Master's or PhD in Linguistics, Cognitive Science, or related field
- Specialization in phonetics, acoustics, psycholinguistics, or cognitive science (applied or interdisciplinary focus preferred over purely theoretical)
- 4+ years of experience in large-scale experiment design and quantitative research in industry or applied research settings
- Hands-on experience building Voice AI applications
- Development experience with Python or similar languages
- Deep knowledge of the structure of several languages; fluency in a language other than English is a plus
- Ability to explain linguistic findings clearly to engineers, product managers, and customers
- Self-starter with outcome-driven mindset and strong stakeholder collaboration skills
- Critical thinking about AI integration with hands-on experience using AI tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf)
Assets:
- Experience evaluating speech recognition and speech synthesis systems
- Experience building applications on top of LLMs, including prompt engineering
