NLP Team Lead

About Riverside

For many of us, there’s that one podcast we never miss, and video content is part of our daily routine, whether it’s professional or personal. But how many of us truly understand the effort that goes on behind the scenes? Here at Riverside, we know it well. That’s exactly why we built an AI-powered platform that helps content creators, podcasters, marketeers, and more at major brands like Netflix, Disney, Google, and Microsoft to create high-quality content with ease.

Riverside’s technology streamlines the entire content creation process, turning ideas into professional-grade content with the highest production standards, without requiring expensive equipment or external services. The secret? AI-driven tools that replace traditional production roles like editing, directing, and design, automating the entire process at the click of a button.

About The Innovation Team

At Riverside, the Innovation team is all about pushing the limits of AI to transform content creation. We work on everything from enhancing audio and video quality to automating production with machine learning, NLP, and computer vision. Whether it’s real-time rendering, intelligent editing, or new ways to process media, we turn cutting-edge research into practical tools that creators rely on. If you’re excited about shaping the future of media tech, you’ll fit right in.

On your day to day

We’re looking for a seasoned and driven Team Lead to head our NLP & Speech team. In this role, you’ll lead a high-performing team of researchers and engineers developing state-of-the-art capabilities in real-time transcription, semantic understanding, content generation, and AI-powered editing tools. Leveraging our unique access to vast multimodal datasets and large-scale compute, your team will drive ambitious applied research projects from concept to deployment - powering intelligent, intuitive experiences for millions of content creators.

As a hands-on team lead, you’ll shape the technical roadmap for NLP and Speech at Riverside, identifying key opportunities to invest in foundational technologies and grow the team through strategic hiring and mentorship. You’ll work cross-functionally with product, engineering, and design partners to ensure that advanced research translates into robust, scalable features that define the future of AI-assisted content creation.

Requirements

• M.Sc. or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Mathematics, Engineering or a related technical field.
• 5+ years of experience in NLP, machine learning or deep learning.
• 2+ years of experience managing ML/AI or software engineering teams.
• Excellent understanding of Deep Learning and modern NLP fundamentals, including Transformers, LLMs, RAG and Agents.
• Hands-on experience with deep Learning frameworks (Pytorch, Tensorflow or JAX) and other relevant libraries (HuggingFace, vLLM, etc.).
• Experience with LLM fine-tuning and deployment at scale on distributed GPU clusters.
• Familiarity with STT / ASR models and common audio / speech processing methods.
• Strong software engineering skills in Python.

Leadership

• Proven ability to lead high-impact teams in a fast-paced applied research environment.
• Experience defining and executing ambitious technical roadmaps and contributing to strategic technical decisions.
• Passion for mentorship, team-building, and fostering a culture of innovation.
• Strong cross-functional collaboration skills and the ability to work closely with PMs, engineers, and other stakeholders.

Bottom line? If you are a passionate, hands-on R&D leader with rich research experience and deep expertise who thrives in a fast-paced, innovative environment - we want to hear from you.

Key skills/competency

• NLP Team Lead
• Natural Language Processing
• Machine Learning
• Deep Learning
• LLMs
• Transformers
• Python
• Team Leadership
• Applied Research
• Speech Recognition