AI Engineer - ASR: PraDigi, a Pratham Initiative

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, record…