Website:
voicearena.com
Job details:
Head of Community, Voice Research Club (Full-time)Location: Travelling across London, New York, San Francisco and Paris · Type: Full-time
About Voice ArenaVoice Arena builds frontier evals, models and datasets for voice AI. Our mission is to make machines talk like humans, and to measure honestly how close they are. Our public leaderboards for speech to text, text to speech, speech to speech and speaker diarization show how speech models perform on real speech, in real conditions.
- Research that gets published. Three papers at Interspeech 2026, and nine papers submitted to ICASSP 2027.
- Partners across the field. Voice Arena is where every new voice model wants to be evaluated, and we partner with Hugging Face and NVIDIA.
- Research-grade datasets. Monsoon will cover 1,000 languages, our child speech dataset will help solve speech recognition for children, and datasets for audio-visual full-duplex models and speaker diarization are coming soon.
About Voice Research ClubVoice Research Club (VRC) brings the academic conference to your own city: a mini Interspeech or ICASSP every month, locally, for the voice and speech research community.
Researchers love academic conferences, but the major ones happen only once or twice a year and mean flying across the world. Most events in cities like San Francisco and New York are business conferences for founders and investors, and very few are academically rigorous, research-first sessions built around papers. VRC fills that gap every month, for a room of 20 to 30 researchers.
What happens at a VRC
- Oral sessions. Two or three oral presentations on the most important speech research of the last one to two months.
- Poster sessions. Posters on recent work, with time to talk to the authors directly.
- Discussion. Researchers question and debate the work, as they would in the hallways of Interspeech.
Who attends matters as much as who speaks: genuine researchers and people building the models that will help machines talk like humans, the same audience you would expect at Interspeech, ICASSP or NeurIPS. VRC has already held multiple sessions in San Francisco, attended by researchers from NVIDIA, Meta, Apple and Gridium, and is expanding to six research hubs, including San Francisco, New York, London and Paris.
About the roleWe're hiring a full-time Head of Community to run Voice Research Club end to end, across all six research hubs. You will own the full calendar: six paper reading sessions a month, one in each hub, plus side events such as poker nights, dinners and socials.
The core question for this role is simple: in every VRC city, would the best voice researchers clear their evening for the next VRC?
You are the host of VRC. You will find the venue, secure the presenters, create and promote the Luma event, invite the audience, write to people across the community and make every VRC a major event in each city's research calendar. You will attend every session in person, build the community with the people in the room and host the evening yourself, working directly with the Voice Arena founders.
How the role grows- Host it yourself. In the first months, you will run every part of each event, from the venue and presenters to promotion and the evening itself.
- Make it repeatable. After the first three or four events in a city, the venue, presenters, audience and promotion are in place, and each new event becomes far easier to run.
- Build a volunteer organisation. Turn VRC into a volunteer-driven organisation, with chapter leads and event leads in every city, so that VRC can take place everywhere without Voice Arena being in every room.
In this role, you will- Curate the programme. Review community paper submissions and recommendations, follow new work from Interspeech, ICASSP and leading labs, and select the most important speech research of the last one to two months for the oral and poster sessions in each hub.
- Invite and prepare presenters. Approach researchers at labs, startups and universities, confirm two or three oral presentations and a set of posters for each session, and help presenters prepare work that leaves room for discussion.
- Build the right audience. Create and promote the Luma event, send invitations and approve registrations, so every room of 20 to 30 is filled with genuine researchers and model builders. Grow the network of researchers in every hub.
- Host every session. Attend and host every session in person, and own the logistics end to end: venue, date, registration, food, AV, poster boards, run of show and moderation, so every session starts on time and runs smoothly.
- Build a volunteer organisation. Recruit, train and lead chapter leads and event leads in each hub, so every city runs VRC to the same standard.
- Run side events. Organise poker nights, researcher dinners and socials, so researchers build relationships beyond the sessions.
- Keep the community engaged. Follow up after each session, share papers, recaps and photographs, maintain relationships with speakers and attendees, and keep the conversation going between sessions.
- Post actively on X. Announce every session and event, share highlights and recaps, and grow VRC's following.
- Measure and improve. Track attendance, audience quality and feedback in every hub, and make each session better than the last.
In a typical month, you might:
- Shortlist papers for six sessions from community submissions and recent conferences
- Confirm oral and poster presenters for each session and hold preparation calls with each
- Review registrations and send personal invitations to key researchers in each hub
- Confirm venues, food and AV, and create and promote each Luma event
- Attend and host every session in person
- Run side events, such as a poker night or a researcher dinner, and recruit new volunteers
Key result areas- Six VRC sessions every month. A high-quality, well-attended session in each of the six hubs, on schedule and with strong presenters.
- Regular community events. Side events that keep researchers connected between sessions.
- Strong relationships with researchers. The best researchers keep coming back and recommend VRC to their peers.
- An active presence on X. Consistent posts before and after every session and event.
- A volunteer-driven organisation. Chapter leads and event leads in every hub who can run VRC to the same standard.
What matters most1. Sessions worth attending
Every session should feel like a mini Interspeech: the best recent research, presented well and debated seriously.
- Rigorous papers. Choose current, technically strong work with open questions worth debating.
- Strong speakers. Bring speakers who present clearly and welcome hard questions.
- Discussion first. Moderate so the discussion, not the slides, is the main event.
2. The right room, every time
The value of VRC lies in who is in the room.
- Researchers first. Fill each room of 20 to 30 with genuine researchers and engineers building speech models.
- Lasting relationships. Know the community by name in every hub, and keep speakers and attendees coming back.
- Smooth execution. Make every session and event run on time, in every city, with nothing left to chance.
What we offer- A front-row seat to voice research. Meet the researchers shaping speech and voice AI, and hear new work before it is widely known.
- A visible role. Be the face of a growing global research community backed by Voice Arena.
- Real scope. A full-time role that owns a programme running in six cities every month.
- Room to grow. Build and lead the team that runs VRC worldwide.
- Intellectual satisfaction. If you are technical by background, nature or interest, you will work alongside the world's leading researchers in voice AI, one of the most important domains in AI.
- High-leverage impact on AI. Contribute in a central and meaningful way to the progress of AI, arguably the most consequential invention in human history.
- Technical depth meets community. The role is built for someone who is technical and also loves community, bringing together researchers from the world's top labs at a time when bringing people together matters more than ever.
- Exceptional compensation. This is one of the best-paid community-building roles in the world.
Minimum qualifications- Experience organising technical events, meetups, reading groups or communities, ideally across more than one city
- Strong organisation and follow-through, with the ability to run several events in parallel
- Excellent written and spoken communication, and comfort hosting a room of researchers
- Be able to travel regularly to VRC hubs all across the world
- A valid US visa is mandatory
Preferred qualifications- A research background in speech, audio or machine learning, as a PhD student, postdoc or industry researcher
- Familiarity with the AI or speech research community, enough to judge what makes a paper worth discussing
- An existing network among voice and speech researchers in the Bay Area or other hubs
- Experience moderating technical talks, managing volunteers or using event tools such as Luma
How to applySend your CV and a short note to amritansh@voicearena.com and shobhit@voicearena.com, with any events or communities you have run.
Click on Apply to know more.
