Machine Learning Team Lead

Modulate is the leader in conversational voice intelligence. We enable enterprises to deeply understand how people communicate and take timely action based on those insights. Our products help detect harm, prevent fraud, and build safer, more trusted online and real-world voice environments. We are building a Conversation Intelligence Platform — APIs, workflows, and applications that bring voice understanding to customers at enterprise scale.

We’re looking for a Machine Learning Team Lead to guide and grow our ML research and engineering team. This role combines deep technical expertise in machine learning with strong leadership skills to ensure the team is focused, effective, and aligned with business priorities. You will work closely with executive stakeholders while supporting a high-performing, collaborative research team.

• Lead and support Modulate’s machine learning research and engineering team

• Ensure the team is aligned with business priorities and product needs

• Help grow team capability through hiring, mentoring, and skill development

• Maintain high team morale and an effective, collaborative culture

• Drive clarity on feasibility, prioritization, and estimation of ML work

• Ensure Modulate continues to ship high-quality, impactful ML models

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  Collaborate with engineers, researchers, and executives (CTO, CEO, VP Product/Design) on ML strategy and priorities

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  Deeply understand the team’s models and research to guide technical direction

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  Help prioritize research and engineering efforts based on impact and feasibility

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  Support the team in designing, training, and shipping machine learning models

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  Mentor researchers and engineers and support their technical growth

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  Participate in hiring and team expansion efforts

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  Communicate model performance and tradeoffs to technical and non-technical stakeholders

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  Optionally contribute directly to ML research and engineering work as an IC when needed

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  Ensure strong collaboration across research, engineering, and product teams

• Experience conducting machine learning research and shipping models

• Experience collaborating closely with other researchers (peer, lead, or mentor level)

• Experience communicating research externally (papers, conferences, etc.)

• Strong experience with Python and PyTorch

• Ability to understand and guide complex ML systems and tradeoffs

• Strong leadership, communication, and organizational skills

• Ability to align technical work with business priorities

• Prior experience managing ML researchers or ML engineering teams

• Experience working with audio models or speech systems (ASR, TTS, etc.)

• Experience with cloud infrastructure, especially AWS

• Experience in fast-paced startup environments