Staff Machine Learning Engineer - Speech and Audio

Why PlayStation?

PlayStation isn’t just the Best Place to Play — it’s also the Best Place to Work. Today, we’re recognized as a global leader in entertainment producing The PlayStation family of products and services including PlayStation®5, PlayStation®4, PlayStation®VR, PlayStation®Plus, acclaimed PlayStation software titles from PlayStation Studios, and more.

PlayStation also strives to create an inclusive environment that empowers employees and embraces diversity. We welcome and encourage everyone who has a passion and curiosity for innovation, technology, and play to explore our open positions and join our growing global team.

The PlayStation brand falls under Sony Interactive Entertainment, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sony Corporation.

Staff Machine Learning Engineer - Speech and Audio 

Future Technology Group, Game Service R&D

Location: San Mateo, CA

PlayStation isn’t just the Best Place to Play — it’s also the Best Place to Work. We’ve thrilled gamers since 1994, when we launched the original PlayStation.
Today, we’re recognized as a global leader in interactive and digital entertainment. The PlayStation brand falls under Sony Interactive Entertainment, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sony Corporation.

The Future Technology Group are PlayStation’s technology experts. We develop innovative technologies that push the boundaries of play, helping game developers make the best games on PlayStation by creating a world class gaming experience. 

As part of the Future Technology Group team, you will be working with small focused project teams researching and implementing cutting edge technologies, and finding ways to apply them to our platform and services.

We are looking for engineers to develop core technology and conduct cutting edge research in speech, audio processing, Image processing and natural language understanding. Our focus is on areas such as text-to-speech, emotion understanding, automatic speech recognition, 3D image modeling, and conversation understanding. We expect the candidate to develop and apply AI and deep learning algorithms, conduct experiments to optimize performance, and build prototypes. We encourage filing patents and publish research.

 Responsibilities:

• Researching state of the art technologies
• Contributing to identifying and developing the technology portfolio of future PlayStation platforms
• Performing research and sharing information internally, in relevant conferences or publications
• Developing proof of concepts and cutting-edge technology prototypes
• Anticipating technology trends and applying these to improve our existing and future PlayStation products/services

Qualifications:

• PhD in Computer Science or Electrical Engineering with a minimum of 3-5 years of experience or a Master's with 6-7 years of experience or 9-10 years of equivalent professional experiences in an R&D setting.
• Experience developing and applying machine learning/deep learning algorithms for audio or speech related tasks
• Deep understanding and hands-on experience in speech/audio processing or generation technologies
• Strong technical background in Machine Learning, Math or Computer Science
• Strong coding and software engineering skills in a mainstream programming language; such as C, C++, Python, etc.
• Hands-on experience working with deep learning toolkits such as Tensorlow, PyTorch, or Keras
• Strong fundamental understanding of Machine Learning theory, architectures and cutting edge research areas
• Experience with research communities, including having published papers at conferences in top machine learning, speech, image or NLP conferences.
• Self-motivated and ability to work independently as well as part of a collaborative team
• Excellent spoken and written communication skills

Nice to have:

• Expertise in Digital signal processing technologies, which may include graduate study period.
• Familiarity and interest in gaming applications.

Benefits of working in the Future Technology Group

• Technology development is not constrained by specific games/engines.
• There is time and space to research and develop cutting edge technologies
• Opportunities to work on collaborative projects with R&D teams across world, and with academia
• Innovation time for research and projects of your own choosing
• Opportunities to participate in global hackathons
• Opportunity to develop your knowledge and skills by learning about the latest techniques in a team of experts with a wealth of industry experience
• Relaxed working environmen