Audio Technology Researcher

At Sonos we want to create the ultimate listening experience for our customers and know that it starts by listening to each other. As part of the Sonos team, you’ll collaborate with people of all styles, skill sets, and backgrounds to realize our vision while fostering a community where everyone feels included and empowered to do the best work of their lives.

The Hearables Innovation Team works at the intersection of audio signal processing, machine learning, acoustics, and audio perception. We research and develop technologies that enable new and unique listening experiences from Sonos products.

This team is the applied research powerhouse behind our innovative headphones and hearables products, such as our new. We are looking for an Audio Technology Researcher to join our team in London Lab to help us build the listening experiences of the future.

What you’ll do

Advanced technology R&D plays a central role in the future of the Sonos sound experience, covering a range of research areas including spatial audio, augmented hearing, sound personalisation, telephony, and sensing.

As an Audio Technology Researcher you will be responsible for:

• Researching, developing, and evaluating audio signal processing and machine learning algorithms and methods.

• Identifying the emerging opportunities presented by new methods and developments in the field.

• Taking ideas from early concepts to scalable, productisable solutions.

• Designing and conducting user-centric audio interaction and listening experiments.

• Hardware and software prototyping (e.g. processing sensor and audio signal data, building prototypes for experiments).

Skills You'll Need

Basic Qualifications

• Ability to formalize, analyze and solve complex problems.

• Demonstrable expertise and research experience in one or more of the following areas:

  • Spatial audio

  • Sensing for audio

  • Sound personalisation

  • Generative audio

  • Spatial computing

  • Augmented hearing

  • Voice processing

• Ph.D. in audio, specialising in one of the above areas or a related topic.

• Knowledge of fundamental DSP and ML techniques for audio (e.g. filter design, time-frequency analysis and processing, statistical modeling).

• Comfortable using Python or Matlab and with version control tools.

• Ability to clearly communicate, present, and disseminate research findings to both specialist and general audiences.

• The ability to be in our London Lab at least 2 days per week.

Preferred Experience

• Empathy for and understanding of user centric experience design.

• An understanding of how technology research & development fits into a fast-paced product development framework.

• Experience with consumer audio research and development.

• Musical and/or critical listening background (playing, producing, engineering).

• Track record of published papers in relevant peer-reviewed journals or conferences (e.g. ICASSP, JASA, TASLP, EUSIPCO, WASPAA, CHI, NeurIPS, ISMIR, Interspeech, AES, SENSORS, UIST, CHI, CVPR, Ubicomp, MobiCom).

Your profile will be reviewed and you'll hear from us once we have an update. At Sonos we take the time to hire right and appreciate your patience.