[Hiring] AI Researcher @Arc

Role Description

At Arc, we are on a mission to amplify employees at local businesses using AI. Voice drive-thru is our first product on that journey: an AI voice agent that takes real orders at the drive-thru speaker, in real time, integrating directly with a business's existing POS and hardware.

As an AI Researcher, you'll push on the modeling and methodology underneath that loop:

• Turn taking, voice activity detection, speech accuracy, order accuracy, and detecting side conversations.
• Conduct rigorous experimentation to know — with statistical confidence — whether a change actually made things better.

This is a research role in service of a product that's live in real drive-thru lanes today, not a lab role disconnected from production.

Qualifications

• Strong applied ML/research background (industry or research lab).
• Hands-on experience taking models from experiment to production.
• Experience with speech/audio ML.
• Solid Python skills and comfort working with training ML models from scratch.
• Experience designing rigorous evaluation methodology — statistically sound benchmarking, synthetic data generation, or dataset curation.
• Comfort operating with ambiguity.
• Strong execution from research idea to real production deployment.

Requirements

• Improve the models that let the agent understand natural, real-world speech.
• Own speech accuracy as an ongoing research problem.
• Data modeling to test and train the system against situations that are rare or hard to collect from live calls.
• Build benchmarking practices that give the team confidence a change actually helped.
• Evaluate models and approaches for both conversation quality and the underlying audio pipeline.
• Work with the applied AI and backend teams to turn research findings into real product improvements.

Benefits

• Significant influence over both the product and the research culture.
• Opportunity to solve a genuinely hard, high-stakes problem.
• Help local businesses run better.