Speech AI Engineer

VINFAST is a pioneering electric vehicle (EV) company committed to revolutionizing the automotive industry with sustainable and innovative mobility solutions. As a leading player in the EV market, VinFast is dedicated to delivering high-quality, cutting-edge electric vehicles that redefine the driving experience. Our team consists of passionate professionals driven by a shared vision of creating a greener and more sustainable future through innovation, technology, and excellence.

The Speech & Conversational AI Center – Automotive AI Development Institute researches, develops, and deploys advanced Agentic AI and Voice AI solutions, applied in vehicles and extended to group-wide use cases such as robotics and AI assistants.

Today's voice agents can transcribe and speak, but they still perceive the world poorly — who is speaking, whether they're addressing the agent, how they feel, and what's happening around them. Speech Understanding is our answer: a single, real-time, LLM-powered model that unifies these audio-understanding signals, so the Voice Agent reasons like a situationally aware partner, not just a command-taker. It outputs natural-language descriptions or structured probabilities the agent can act on directly. We start with Vietnamese and English, backed by our own data, benchmarks, and a shared evaluation framework across the ASR, TTS, Foundation, and Agent teams.

Responsibilities:

• Research and build a unified, real-time Speech Understanding model — powered by an LLM — that lets the Voice Agent perceive speakers, their state, the environment, and audio content beyond the transcript; prototype agent-awareness behaviors using simulated agents and scripted scenarios.
  

• Build the Vietnamese data and benchmark foundations: data collection, annotation, and synthetic data, plus a shared evaluation framework that measures real impact on agent behavior, not only model metrics.
  

• Train, fine-tune, and post-train audio and audio-LLM models (pretraining, SFT, alignment) and optimize them for low-latency streaming inference.
  

• Work with the ASR, TTS, Foundation, and Agent teams to integrate models into conversational systems and voice assistants, including demanding in-vehicle conditions.
  

• Stay current with the research community and contribute new ideas and, where appropriate, publications.
  

In this role, you'll join the Speech Understanding team and work across the full loop — data, models, evaluation, and integration into a production Voice Agent. We're looking for people with relevant experience, passion, and drive, ready to learn fast and thrive under pressure.

• Bachelor's Degree or higher in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, or related fields.
  

• Minimum 2 years of experience in AI/ML, with a focus on speech and audio (ASR, audio understanding, or related areas) or on audio/multimodal LLMs.
  

• Proficient in Python and PyTorch, with a strong grasp of Transformers and modern speech/audio models (self-supervised encoders, Whisper-style models, audio-LLMs).
  

• Hands-on experience training or fine-tuning models — ideally LLMs (SFT, PEFT/LoRA) — and building or evaluating speech datasets.
  

• Comfortable with open-ended, research-driven problems where the problem definition is still evolving.
  

• Good English proficiency to read technical documentation and research papers.
  

Preferred

• Experience with Vietnamese, multilingual, or code-switching speech.
  

• Experience with real-time streaming systems or voice agents, and interest in multimodal (voice and vision) agents.
  

• Publications in top-tier AI/speech conferences (e.g., Interspeech, ICASSP, NeurIPS).