[Hiring] AI Engineer @Pratham International

Role Description

Pratham International, through its wholly-owned subsidiary in India (PULS Pvt. Ltd.), is looking to hire an AI Engineer for the PraDigi Initiative. As an ASR Engineer, you will lead the development and deployment of speech recognition systems for automated reading assessment across multiple languages. This is a hands-on role at the intersection of speech recognition, multilingual NLP, and educational assessment.

Key Responsibilities

• Data Collection and Annotation
  • Provide technical inputs to speech data collection design, including sampling across languages, dialects, age groups, reading levels, recording environments, devices, and target items.
  • Define annotation guidelines and quality checks for transcripts, reading errors, disfluencies, background speech, and other phenomena relevant to reading assessment.
  • Work with data and field teams to identify data gaps and annotation inconsistencies through model error analysis.
  • Help design annotation schemas and inter-annotator quality processes.
• Model Training
  • Train, fine-tune, and evaluate ASR models for children’s read speech across multiple languages and accents.
  • Build pipelines for audio preprocessing, segmentation, normalization, transcription alignment, and model training.
  • Adapt existing ASR architectures such as Whisper, wav2vec 2.0, Conformer, CTC/RNN-T, or similar models.
  • Optimize models for practical deployment environments.
• Adopting for Reading Assessment
  • Develop approaches for accurately detecting substitutions, omissions, insertions, repetitions, partial-word attempts, hesitations, and self-corrections.
  • Conduct systematic error analysis by language, reading level, age, accent, gender, recording conditions, and device.
  • Collaborate with assessment experts and field teams to translate model outputs into measures such as reading accuracy, WCPM, fluency, and reading level.
• Benchmarking
  • Define and track ASR metrics relevant to reading assessment.
  • Build reproducible experimentation and model-evaluation pipelines and maintain clear technical documentation.

Qualifications

• A Degree in any Mathematics/Computer Science/Data Science or related STEM field.
• 3-5 years of full-time experience; at least 2 working in an AI/ML role.
• Strong experience in automatic speech recognition, speech processing, or spoken-language technologies.
• Strong Python skills and experience with PyTorch or similar deep-learning frameworks.
• Experience working with modern ASR architectures and toolkits such as Hugging Face Transformers, NeMo, Kaldi, or equivalent.
• Understanding of ASR concepts including:
  • Acoustic modelling
  • CTC / transducer / encoder-decoder architectures
  • Decoding and beam search
  • Language models
  • Forced alignment
  • Phoneme representations
  • WER/CER and ASR error analysis
• Experience preparing and working with large-scale audio and transcription datasets.
• Ability to diagnose model errors systematically rather than relying only on aggregate transcription accuracy.

Benefits

• Impact at a Global Scale: Your work will directly support the learning journeys of millions of children.
• Unique Technical Challenges: Solve "last-mile" problems rarely addressed in the commercial sector.
• A Culture of Growth and Evidence: Value rigorous testing and continuous learning.
• High-Calibre, Mission-Driven Team: Work alongside a global team of experts.
• Inclusive and Collaborative Environment: Join a diverse team that values innovative thinking and local expertise.

Employment Details

• Contract Type: Full-Time Employment
• Date of Joining: Immediate
• Work from Anywhere in India: Flexible, remote-first work environment.
• Competitive Remuneration: Salary benchmarked against industry standards for AI roles.

To apply

Fill out the form attached. Shortlisted candidates will be contacted for further rounds. Please refer to this Guidance on Candidates AI Usage by Anthropic to understand how to present yourself to Pratham International effectively.

Pratham International is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are dedicated to creating a diverse and inclusive workplace.