AI Research Scientist

About US Shunya Labs is building the Voice AI Infrastructure Layer for Enterprises powering speech intelligence, conversational agents, and domain-specific voice applications across industries. Born from deep work in mental-health AI and built for global enterprise scale, our stack combines state-of-the-art ASR/TTS models with an open-weights philosophy , driving accuracy, privacy, and scalability. We’re looking for an AI Research Scientist who combines deep technical understanding of AI systems with the curiosity to explore how emerging models can reshape real-world industries. This role sits at the intersection of research, strategy, and applied innovation identifying automation opportunities, developing proofs-of-concept, and translating cutting-edge AI into scalable products. You’ll work closely with leadership, engineering, and clients to define the company’s AI product roadmap , continuously evaluate the evolving AI landscape, and design systems that deliver measurable operational impact. Industry Research & Opportunity Discovery Study operational workflows across diverse industries (insurance, healthcare, logistics, financial services, manufacturing, etc.). Identify high-impact automation and augmentation opportunities using AI and LLM-based systems. Conduct process diagnostics — mapping inefficiencies, manual dependencies, and automation gaps. Collaborate with domain experts to design AI-driven transformation blueprints for clients and internal use cases. AI Research & Model Development Continuously track latest AI research , model architectures, and open-source innovations (LLMs, vision models, multimodal systems). Conduct deep technical analysis of foundation models — transformer internals, embeddings, retrieval architectures, diffusion, etc. Build and fine-tune custom AI models for tasks such as language understanding, summarization, transcription, classification, and reasoning. Develop evaluation frameworks for model performance, fairness, and interpretability. Work with engineering teams to translate research prototypes into market-ready products . Define technical strategy and architecture for AI-driven product lines. Contribute to internal IP creation — model enhancements, pre-training pipelines, or domain-specific datasets. Lead feasibility assessments for model-hosting infrastructure, inference optimization, and deployment scalability. Stay ahead of global AI trends by following leading research labs, open-source communities, and academic breakthroughs. Represent the organization in conferences, panels, and AI research forums. Mentor junior researchers and engineers in AI methodologies and experimentation. Partner with business and product leaders to align research outcomes with commercial goals. Participate in client discussions , understanding pain points and shaping AI-powered solutions. Provide strategic inputs on go-to-market initiatives for AI offerings. Strong foundation in AI/ML algorithms , deep learning architectures , and transformer-based models . Experience with Python , PyTorch , TensorFlow , Hugging Face , and LangChain ecosystems. Hands-on experience with model training, fine-tuning, and evaluation . Ability to read and interpret AI research papers , reproduce experiments, and assess feasibility. Understanding of LLM internals (tokenization, attention, context windows, embeddings, quantization). Excellent written and verbal communication for presenting research and influencing stakeholders. Experience building domain-specific AI models (e.g., financial document analysis, claims automation, customer service bots). Background in data curation , synthetic data generation , or evaluation pipelines . Familiarity with AWS Sagemaker , Vertex AI , or custom training environments . Published research or contributions to open-source AI projects. Strategic mindset — can balance research creativity with product pragmatism.