Staff ML Engineer, Reality Defender
Audio
$185-235k
Salary benchmarked on USD rates and may differ on location + Equity + Bonus
Enterprise-grade deepfake detection
Open for applications
Enterprise-grade deepfake detection
21-100 employees
Open for applications
$185-235k
Salary benchmarked on USD rates and may differ on location + Equity + Bonus
21-100 employees
Company mission
To help companies, governments, and journalists determine if media is real or fake, focusing on audio, video and image manipulation.
Role
Who you are
- PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Signal Processing, or related field (or equivalent industry experience)
- 2+ years of industry experience building and deploying ML/DL models for AI products
- Strong programming skills in Python and model ML frameworks (PyTorch, JAX)
- Solid understanding of audio processing fundamentals, classification and detection metrics (ROC, DET curves, precision/recall trade-offs), model robustness and evaluation
- Proven experience with large-scale training and benchmarking pipelines
- Prior experience in a client-facing or solutions-oriented AI role is a plus
- Preference for candidates comfortable with EST work hours
What the job involves
- We are seeking a Staff ML Engineer (Audio) to build, tune, and deploy state-of-the-art audio deepfake detection models in real-world client environments
- This is a highly cross-functional client-facing role requiring close collaboration with Research, Production Engineering, and Customer Success teams
- You will be responsible not just for model development, but for ensuring robustness, reliability, and performance under diverse real-world test conditions — including adversarial and edge-case scenarios
- This role requires deep hands-on expertise in model building, training, benchmarking, and productionization — along with the ability to translate complex model behavior into actionable insights for both technical and non-technical stakeholders
- Design, build, and optimize ML/DL models for production-scale audio deepfake detection, ensuring robustness across diverse real-world conditions including compression artifacts, noise, telephony, and streaming pipelines
- Partner with clients to develop a deep understanding of their production environments and define model performance criteria
- Investigate failure cases in client environments, build custom evaluation frameworks, and implement mitigation strategies spanning both Engineering and AI
- Design and execute structured experimentation roadmaps aligned with client requirements and proactive system resilience goals. Translate findings into clear and actionable insights
- Monitor, measure, and report on model performance in production using data analytics and AI observability tools (e.g. Datadog, Metabase). Identify degradation trends, data drift, and emerging threat patterns before they impact client outcomes
- Build and maintain dashboards and analytics pipelines that surface model health metrics, enabling data-driven decisions across AI, Engineering, and Product teams
- Collaborate with cross-functional partners — Applied Scientists, Deployment Engineers, and Product teams — to deploy scalable, production-grade models with clear performance benchmarks and monitoring in place
Our take
Reality Defender was born out of The AI Foundation to help protect the 2020 US Elections from the threat of deepfakes. It officially launched as a company in 2021, based in New York. Today there continues to be a genuine issue where the public cannot decipher what is true or false online due to the existence of easily-created deepfakes.
Reality Defender's platform empowers enterprises to highlight and flag fraudulent users and content found online. Its API and app also provide risk scoring, reporting, and forensics review.
Reality Defender was selected as part of Y Combinator’s 2022 batch, the same backing received by Monzo, Airbnb and Stripe in their early days. This backing, paired with the founding team’s experience of over twenty years at Google, Goldman Sachs, and the Intelligence Community, as well as its 2023 award win, has worked well for this early-stage startup.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Company
Company benefits
- Healthcare plans with 100% premium coverage for employees and partial coverage available for dependents
- Dental and Vision plans with 100% premium coverage for employees and their dependents
- Short/Long-term disability and life insurance plans with 100% premium coverage for employees
- FSA/HSA and 401k programs
- Equity compensation
- 20 days of PTO per year
- 12 weeks of Parental Leave
- Learning and Development budget
- Monthly wellness benefits
- Annual company-sponsored offsite
Company HQ
Manhattan, New York, NY
Leadership
Gaurav Bharaj
(Co-Founder & Advisor)Previously the Chief Science Officer at Flawless, the Vice President of Research for The AI Foundation and a Senior Researcher for Technicolor.
Ali Shahriyari
(Co-Founder & Advisor)Previously acted as the Director of Product for The AI Foundation and as a Vice President for Originate.
Ben Colman
(Co-Founder & CEO)Co-founded PlaceAVote. Previously acted as NYC Lead for Xoogler.co, CEO for Convertix, and Vice President for Goldman Sachs.
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