Audio Software Engineer

<p><strong>About Hark</strong></p> <p>Hark is an artificial intelligence company building advanced, personalized intelligence. One that is proactive, multimodal, and capable of interacting with the world through speech, text, vision, and persistent memory.</p> <p>We're pairing that intelligence with next-generation hardware to create a universal interface between humans and machines. While today's AI largely operates through chat boxes and decade-old devices, Hark is focused on what comes next: agentic systems that interact naturally with people and the real world.</p> <p>To get there, we're developing multimodal models and next-generation AI hardware together - designed from the ground up as a single, unified interface for a new era of intelligent systems.</p> <p><strong>About the Role&nbsp;</strong></p> <p>We're hiring a Member of Technical Staff (Real-Time Audio) to join our Product Engineering team. Hark’s voice agent holds real-time, full-duplex conversations with people in homes, cars, and noisy rooms. That experience is only as good as the audio underneath it.</p> <p>This role owns the real-time audio that makes conversations feel natural (echo cancellation, noise suppression, and voice activity detection) as production code in our live client. This is not a research role and not a DSP theory role. We're looking for someone who can do both: understand the signal processing and ship the code.</p> <p><strong>Responsibilities</strong></p> <ul> <li>Own audio quality on the client: echo, self-interruption, dropouts, and clipping</li> <li>Build and tune the browser audio pipeline with the Web Audio API, AudioWorklet, and getUserMedia constraints</li> <li>Work the WebRTC audio path end to end: AEC, noise suppression, and VAD</li> <li>Ship DSP to the client as C++/Rust compiled to WebAssembly, and as TypeScript in the audio pipeline</li> <li>Tune endpointing, interruption, and turn-taking so the agent listens like a person</li> <li>Reduce conversational latency and artifacts across the streaming pipeline</li> <li>Work in our React/TypeScript client where audio meets the UI</li> <li>Manage features end-to-end from prototyping through production</li> <li>Collaborate with designers, platform engineers, and our speech team.</li> </ul> <p><strong>Requirements</strong></p> <ul> <li>5+ years of software engineering experience</li> <li>Shipped real-time audio into a product used by real users</li> <li>Hands-on experience with WebRTC, AEC (echo cancellation), noise suppression, and VAD</li> <li>Strong DSP fundamentals: adaptive filtering, STFT, resampling, and gain control</li> <li>C/C++ or Rust for production DSP, and experience shipping it to the browser via WebAssembly</li> <li>Working knowledge of the browser audio stack: Web Audio API, AudioWorklet, and MediaStream constraints</li> <li>Comfort with latency, buffering, and sample rates in a streaming audio pipeline</li> <li>Owns features end-to-end and works comfortably in a shared production codebase.</li> </ul> <p><strong>Bonus Qualifications</strong></p> <ul> <li>Experience working at a voice, speech, or video-conferencing company</li> <li>ML for audio: noise suppression, VAD, or source separation (e.g. RNNoise, DeepFilterNet, Silero VAD), and on-device inference (ONNX Runtime, Core ML)</li> <li>Familiarity with WebRTC internals (the Audio Processing Module, AEC3, Opus) and voice-agent frameworks (LiveKit, Pipecat)</li> <li>TypeScript and React, and comfort working across the product frontend</li> <li>Experience with target-speaker isolation, diarization, or barge-in and turn-detection systems for conversational AI.</li> </ul> <p><strong>Compensation</strong></p> <p>The US base salary range for this full-time position is between $170,000–$400,000 annually.</p> <p>The pay offered for this position may vary based on several individual factors, including job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. The total compensation package may also include additional components/benefits depending on the specific role. This information will be shared if an employment offer is extended.</p>