Audio Quality and Data Engineer at Hark
San Jose, CA
$250,000–$300,000from the description
Jul 15, 2026
San Jose, CA
Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
This role centers on owning audio quality measurement across an AI voice product's full signal chain — from microphone hardware and speech enhancement algorithms through telephony paths and conversational models. The engineer will design test methodologies, build and maintain automated test infrastructure, and lead audio data collection programs that feed both evaluation and model training. It suits someone with deep hands-on experience in audio DSP, objective quality metrics, and professional test equipment who is comfortable working across hardware, firmware, and ML teams.
Senior level · 5+ years · National · Bachelor's required · Full-time
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $119,144 (middle half $81,115–$160,963). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (6)
This role is a genuine hybrid of audio DSP engineering, test infrastructure development (Python automation, CI pipelines), and data engineering — it does not map cleanly to any single SOC code. 15-1299 (Computer Occupations, All Other) is used as the best available fit; 15-1252 (Software Developers) is a plausible runner-up given the emphasis on building automated test systems and scoring pipelines.
No work location or metro is specified in the posting. The company (Hark) appears to be a US-based AI startup, but no city or remote policy is stated — location fields are left blank.
The degree requirement is B.S. in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related field; M.S./Ph.D. is preferred but not required. Degree requirement is set to Bachelors as the stated minimum hard gate.
Audio test equipment skills (Audio Precision, ACQUA, HATS, B&K/GRAS microphones) are listed under the required section. These are treated as hard gates despite being specialized hardware rather than software tools.
POLQA, PESQ, STOI, and DNSMOS are listed together as objective audio quality metrics; POLQA is used as the primary name with the others as alternatives since they serve the same evaluation function.
LLM-based voice agent evaluation, ASR methodology, C/C++, and Bluetooth/embedded audio experience all appear under 'Bonus Qualifications' and are marked preferred accordingly.
Read the full posting
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