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AI Engineer - ASR: PraDigi, a Pratham Initiative

About Pratham International

Pratham International is a US 501(c)(3) established to support learning innovations for children and youth in contexts across the globe. We enable the adaptation and spread of proven and scalable education solutions pioneered in India by Pratham Education Foundation to contexts across the global south through programming and technical assistance tailored to local realities. Today, Pratham reaches approximately 7.5 million children annually across 23 Indian states and union territories and an additional 1 million across 31 countries..

Through the Pratham Shah PraDigi Innovation Centre (PraDigi), Pratham International also seeks to create technology innovations for low-resource communities, and support models aimed at learning for school, work, and life for children and youth. We work on several cutting-edge projects in the domain of Generative AI, Automatic Speech Recognition, and Natural Language Processing.

The team’s innovative technology products include the Anytime Testing Model (ATM), an AI-enabled question generation and grading system that allows learners to be assessed on any topic, anytime; PadhAI: Reading Assessment App, which uses advanced speech recognition to evaluate children’s reading fluency in Hindi and eight Indian languages; and a suite of LLM-powered chatbots designed for diverse learning contexts: from BaalSakhi for early childhood care, to a skilling interview bot for youth employment readiness, and OCR-based analysis tools that digitize and assess student work at scale.

At Pratham International, we build for the long term. Whether it’s ensuring products are truly accessible across rural India and the global south through languages, building datasets to ensure context and accuracy for products, or gathering feedback from the field. Backed by partners like Google.org, Anthropic, and the Gates Foundation, we are committed to building digital public goods that ensure every child is in school and learning well.

Description of the Role
Pratham International, through its wholly-owned subsidiary in India (PULS Pvt. Ltd.), is looking to hire an AI Engineer for the PraDigi Initiative.

As an ASR Engineer, you will lead the development and deployment of speech recognition systems for automated reading assessment across multiple languages. The engineer will work across the full ASR pipeline: from supervising data collection, annotation, data preparation and model training to decoding, alignment, error analysis, and deployment. This is a hands-on role at the intersection of speech recognition, multilingual NLP, and educational assessment.

Key responsibilities include:

Data Collection and Annotation

• Provide technical inputs to speech data collection design, including sampling across languages, dialects, age groups, reading levels, recording environments, devices, and target items to ensure the dataset is representative and useful for model training and evaluation.
• Define annotation guidelines and quality checks for transcripts, reading errors, disfluencies, background speech and other phenomena relevant to reading assessment.
• Work with data and field teams to identify data gaps and annotation inconsistencies through model error analysis, and recommend targeted additional data collection or re-annotation where needed.
• Help design annotation schemas and inter-annotator quality processes so labels are consistent enough for model training, alignment, and evaluation.

Model Training

• Train, fine-tune, and evaluate ASR models for children’s read speech across multiple languages and accents.
• Build pipelines for audio preprocessing, segmentation, normalization, transcription alignment, and model training.
• Adapt existing ASR architectures such as Whisper, wav2vec 2.0, Conformer, CTC/RNN-T, or similar models for reading assessment.
• Optimize models for practical deployment environments, including low-bandwidth, store-and-forward, server-based, and potentially offline/mobile inference.

Adopting for Reading Assessment

• Develop approaches for accurately detecting substitutions, omissions, insertions, repetitions, partial-word attempts, hesitations and self-corrections. Implement forced alignment, phoneme-level alignment, or pronunciation-scoring approaches where required.
• Conduct systematic error analysis by language, reading level, age, accent, gender, recording conditions, and device.
• Collaborate with assessment experts and field teams to translate model outputs into measures such as reading accuracy, WCPM, fluency, and reading level.

Benchmarking

• Define and track ASR metrics relevant to reading assessment, including WER/CER, word-level accuracy, error-detection precision/recall, alignment accuracy, and reading-score agreement with human evaluators.
• Build reproducible experimentation and model-evaluation pipelines and maintain clear technical documentation.

Desired Experience and Qualification

We are looking for an AI/ML Engineer with ASR expertise that can own the ASR based reading assessment pipeline across multiple languages

• A Degree in any Mathematics/Computer Science/Data Science or related STEM field
• 3-5 years of full-time experience; at least 2 working in an AI/ML role
• Strong experience in automatic speech recognition, speech processing, or spoken-language technologies.
• Strong Python skills and experience with PyTorch or similar deep-learning frameworks.
• Experience working with modern ASR architectures and toolkits such as Hugging Face Transformers, NeMo, Kaldi, or equivalent.
• Understanding of ASR concepts including:

  -acoustic modelling

  -CTC / transducer / encoder-decoder architectures
  -decoding and beam search
  -language models
  -forced alignment
  -phoneme representations
  -WER/CER and ASR error analysis

• Experience preparing and working with large-scale audio and transcription datasets.
• Ability to diagnose model errors systematically rather than relying only on aggregate transcription accuracy.

Why join us?

• Impact at a Global Scale: Your work will directly support the learning journeys of millions of children. With programs active in 31 countries, you will help build Digital Public Goods that bridge the gap for the millions of children across the Global South who still struggle with foundational literacy.
• Unique Technical Challenges: We apply advanced machine learning where it is needed most. You will solve "last-mile" problems—such as training ASR models on children's voices and optimizing LLMs for offline, low-bandwidth environments—that are rarely addressed in the commercial sector.
• A Culture of Growth and Evidence: At Pratham, we value rigorous testing and continuous learning. You will have the autonomy to experiment with the latest SOTA models, supported by a 5-year strategic roadmap and funding from partners like the Gates Foundation and Anthropic.
• High-Calibre, Mission-Driven Team: You will work alongside a global team of experts from institutions like MIT, Harvard, and INSEAD. Our alumni have gone on to lead successful startups and international policy shifts, all while remaining dedicated to the goal of "Every Child in School and Learning Well."
• Inclusive and Collaborative Environment: Join a diverse team that spans Asia, Africa, and Latin America. We value innovative thinking and local expertise, ensuring that the technology we build is deeply rooted in the realities of the communities we serve.

Employment Details

• Contract Type: Full-Time Employment
• Date of Joining: Immediate
• Work from Anywhere in India: We offer a flexible, remote-first work environment for candidates based anywhere in India. While you have the autonomy to work from where you are most productive, you will have the unique opportunity to travel to our field locations periodically. These visits are essential to see your models in the hands of learners and to gather the real-world feedback that drives our innovation.
• Competitive Remuneration: Salary is benchmarked against industry standards for AI roles and is commensurate with experience. As a global organization, we are committed to providing a package that recognizes the high-market value of your technical expertise alongside the deep social impact of your work.

To apply

• Fill out the form attached
• Shortlisted candidates will be contacted for further rounds
• Please refer to this Guidance on Candidates AI Usage by Anthropic to understand how to present yourself to Pratham International effectively

Pratham International is an Equal Opportunity Employer
We are dedicated to creating a diverse and inclusive workplace. We welcome applications from all qualified individuals, regardless of race, gender, disability, or any other legally protected status.

Originally posted on Himalayas