Reality Defender is hiring: Applied Scientist II (Audio) in New York

Who we are.

Reality Defender is an award-winning cybersecurity company helping enterprises and governments detect deepfakes and AI-generated media. Utilizing a patented multi-model approach, Reality Defender is robust against the bleeding edge of generative platforms producing video, audio, imagery, and text media. Reality Defender's API-first deepfake detection platform empowers teams and developers alike to identify fraud, disinformation campaigns, and harmful deepfakes in real time.

Backed by world class investors including DCVC, Illuminate Financial, Y Combinator, Booz Allen Hamilton, IBM, Accenture, Rackhouse, and Argon VC, Reality Defender works with leading enterprise clients, financial institutions, and governments in order to ensure AI-generated media is not used for malicious purposes.

Youtube: Reality Defender Wins RSA Most Innovative Startup

The Applied Scientist II (Audio) Role.

We are seeking an Applied Scientist II to build, tune, and deploy state-of-the-art audio deepfake detection models in real-world client environments.

You will be responsible primarily for model tuning and deployment, ensuring robustness, reliability, and performance under diverse real-world test conditions — including adversarial and edge-case scenarios. The role requires deep hands-on expertise in model building, training, and benchmarking.

What you’ll do

• Tune and optimize ML/DL models for production-scale audio deepfake detection.




• Investigate failure cases in the client environment, build custom evaluation frameworks, and implement mitigation strategies for model robustness.




• Drive model iteration for performance under a variety of real-world environments, e.g. compression artifacts, noise, telephony, and streaming pipelines.




• Present technical findings and model performance insights to internal stakeholders.




• Interface with Product and Engineering teams to build a deep understanding of the production environment and incorporate relevant evaluations for performance assessment.

Who you are.

• Master’s or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Signal Processing, or related field.




• Fresh PhD graduate, or Masters with 3+ years of industry experience building and deploying ML/DL models for AI products.




• Strong programming skills in Python and model ML frameworks (PyTorch, JAX).




• Solid understanding of audio processing fundamentals, classification and detection metrics (ROC, DET curves, precision/recall trade-offs), model robustness and evaluation.




• Experience with large-scale training and benchmarking pipelines, either in an academic or an industry research role.

What we offer.

Reality Defender offers the following benefits to all our employees, regardless of location:

• Healthcare plans with 100% premium coverage for employees and partial coverage available for dependents




• Dental and Vision plans with 100% premium coverage for employees and their dependents




• Short/Long-term disability and life insurance plans with 100% premium coverage for employees




• FSA/HSA and 401k programs




• Equity compensation




• 20 days of PTO per year




• 12 weeks of Parental Leave




• Learning and Development budget




• Monthly wellness benefits




• Annual company-sponsored offsite

For employees working from Reality Defender’s HQ in NYC, we offer the following benefits:

• Daily in-office lunch through UberEats




• Commuter benefits




• Remote Fridays




• Happy Hours and other local events