Embedded Audio Software Engineer

Established in 2017, Whisper is a team of artificial intelligence, hearing care, hardware, and software experts coming together to solve the challenge of providing better hearing. We set out to make the Whisper Hearing System so our parents, grandparents, friends and teammates can have a tomorrow that sounds even better than today.

Based in San Francisco, Whisper is lucky to have the support of great investors including Sequoia Capital, First Round Capital, Quiet Capital, IVP, and more.

THE ROLE

As the Embedded Audio Software Engineer at Whisper you’ll be responsible for implementing, testing, and maintaining algorithms for a next generation wireless hearing aid platform. You will work closely with experts in signal processing, hearing aids, and machine learning to improve audio experiences for our customers. This will include developing and tweaking existing DSP algorithms to be best optimized for our hardware platform and consumer use case.

Key job duties for this role include writing and testing shipping code on the target hardware in assembly and C to bring these algorithms to customers.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Work closely with experts in signal processing and deep learning to implement, test, and maintain hearing aid algorithms on a low power heterogeneous multicore device that includes several DSPs and ARM cores.
• Optimize existing (either in-house or vendor-provided) algorithms to our hearing aid system.
• Debug and improve audio processing performance on target hardware using manufacturing samples.
• Receive feedback from customers to improve the hearing experience in the Whisper hearing aid system in conjunction with the machine learning acoustics team.

MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS

• Strong embedded coding expertise, particularly in C.
• Product focused: Excited to work at a young company and take a major role in developing a new hardware product that will help people hear better in everyday situations.
• Experience of DSP algorithms or similar techniques.
• Comfortable prototyping audio algorithms (e.g. MATLAB or Python) and bringing these algorithms to the DSP by writing customer-facing code (e.g. Assembly and C).
• Understanding of analog and digital audio processing (in particular filter theory and design) and adaptive audio processing algorithms.
• 2+ years of experience working in a team software engineering environment (e.g. code reviewing, source control, etc). working in a team software engineering environment (e.g. code reviewing, source control, etc).

BONUS POINTS

• Assembly and DSP coding expertise.
• Theoretical background of signal processing techniques such as adaptive filtering, filter banks and wavelet processing, speech analysis and synthesis, speech and audio coding.
• Familiar with traditional statistical modeling/feature extraction techniques (GMM, HMM, NMF / spectrograms, MFCC etc) for voice recognition and audio event classification.
• Experience with machine learning techniques (e.g. deep neural nets) to solve audio tasks like audio event classification or voice detection.
• Electrical (analog and digital) audio design knowledge.
• Audio qualification experience, including calibration procedures, test procedures, equipment, tools, etc.

If you're interested in difficult and novel problems in embedded audio, immediate ownership of company defining decisions, competitive compensation, and meaningful work that could help 430MM+ people hear again - we'd love to hear from you.

Whisper is an equal opportunity employer committed to a diverse workforce with an inclusive working environment for everyone to do their best work. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.