Namecoach/Euphonia
Founding Voice AI Engineer (part-time, path to CAIO) | SF or Remote
hn · Founding Voice AI Engineer (part-time, path to CAIO) · $30-120
Jose has deep founding engineer experience shipping 0→1 AI products with real-time voice systems (WebRTC, OpenAI Realtime API, sub-200ms latency), strong full-stack capabilities across Python/TypeScript/FastAPI, and proven ability to own architecture and infrastructure decisions. However, he lacks demonstrated expertise in phonetics, speech science, grapheme-to-phoneme models, and ASR/TTS internals that the role explicitly emphasizes as core competencies for this voice AI position.
Hook: Your experience building production real-time voice systems at scale and owning end-to-end AI product architecture aligns perfectly with Euphonia's founding engineering needs, though you'd be learning phonetics and G2P modeling on the job.
Missing: Grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) modeling, Speech phonetics and IPA expertise, ASR/TTS internals and model development, Voice synthesis fine-tuning, Phoneme-level speech processing
Posting
Namecoach/Euphonia | Founding Voice AI Engineer (part-time, path to CAIO) | SF or Remote | REMOTE | Contract / Part-time, ~$30-120/hr by seniority, potentially converting to FT Namecoach has spent 10 years building the largest verified pronunciation dataset of its kind: ~2M self-recorded name pronunciations, plus a large corpus of human-verified phonetic spellings. We're now building Euphonia (https://euphonia.namecoach.ai/), a provider-neutral middleware layer that makes any TTS engine pronounce names, acronyms, and other out-of-vocabulary terms correctly. The new wave of TTS (models from OpenAI, ElevenLabs, etc) sounds great but gives you almost no phoneme-level control, so it gets lots of names and words wrong and you can't easily fix it. We sit in front of these engines and fix it. We want real depth in speech and phonetics: grapheme-to-phoneme, IPA, ASR/TTS internals, and the ability to build and evaluate models around them (the recognition and G2P side especially). You should be comfortable shipping with agentic dev tools like Claude Code and Cursor. This is a 0 to 1 founding voice AI engineering role with a genuine path to Chief AI Officer for the right person. Part-time to start (flexible hours, ~2hr/day overlap with US Pacific), with a paid take-home and a paid trial month before anything longer term. Potential conversion to full-time role. Series A closed, bridge to B in motion. Full JD: https://wellfound.com/l/2ChdJ2 Email hiring+hn@name-coach.com with a short note on what interests you and a link to something you've built. G2P / TTS / ASR open-source work gets read first.