Dolby Laboratories

AI Architect

Dolby Laboratories • $152K — $209K *
Atlanta, GA 30349In-Person
Enterprise Technology
5 - 7 years of experience
Today
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Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • Bachelor's or Master's degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, or equivalent experience.
  • Hands on experience in AI, machine learning, and embedded software engineering.
  • Strong software engineering skills and experience with version control and software delivery pipelines.
  • Proficiency in at least one major AI/ML framework like PyTorch or TensorFlow.
  • Experience deploying optimized ML models with techniques like quantization and pruning.
  • Familiarity with edge ML, addressing latency and resource constraints.
  • Knowledge of CPU, GPU, NPU, and DSP architectures.

Responsibilities

  • Define and guide AI/ML technology strategy across Dolby's product areas.
  • Establish best practices for building and deploying ML models.
  • Serve as the technical interface between ML research and engineering teams.
  • Integrate ML models into products and align with researchers on requirements.
  • Establish data governance standards with Data Engineering teams.
  • Collaborate with silicon vendors on hardware capabilities relevant to ML models.
  • Conduct experiments to evaluate model performance and optimization techniques.

Benefits

  • Comprehensive health insurance and wellness programs.
  • Flexible work arrangements including remote options.
  • Retirement savings plan with company contributions.
  • Generous paid time off and holiday schedule.
  • Professional development and training opportunities.
  • Opportunities for career advancement and internal mobility.
Full Job Description
Role Overview

We are seeking a Senior Staff AI / Machine Learning Architect to serve as a key technical bridge between research teams and product engineering organizations. In this role, you will help translate advanced machine learning research into efficient, scalable, and production ready solutions across Dolby's product portfolio.

You will play a critical role in defining technical strategy for developing, training, and deploying AI/ML models-particularly in edge ML and NPU enabled platforms-while collaborating closely with researchers, software engineers, and external partners such as silicon vendors. This highly cross functional role combines hands on technical expertise with system level thinking and technical leadership, influencing direction across projects and teams through execution and clear technical communication.

Key Responsibilities

Technical Strategy and Leadership

  • Define and guide AI/ML technology strategy across Dolby's core technology areas (audio processing, video processing, personalization, and related domains), spanning cloud, edge, and embedded environments, with a focus on edge ML, GPUs, and NPUs
  • Anticipate evolving business and technical needs and contribute to a forward looking technical vision
  • Establish best practices, guardrails, and technical guidelines for building, training, optimizing, and deploying ML models across the organization
  • Stay current with developments in AI/ML, including emerging architectures and edge inference techniques, and translate industry trends into practical, production oriented recommendations for accelerated hardware


Bridge Research and Engineering

  • Serve as a primary technical interface between ML research teams and engineering teams
  • Define architectural approaches for integrating traditional audio/video processing (DSPs, hardware accelerators) with ML models
  • Partner with platform managers and engineering teams to integrate ML models into shipped products, and collaborate with researchers to align on requirements and constraints
  • Work with Data Engineering teams to help establish data governance guidelines and standards for data sourcing, cleaning, and pipeline management
  • Collaborate with QA teams to develop testing methodologies appropriate for AI/ML systems


Engage with Silicon Vendors

  • Develop a working understanding of GPU and NPU architectures, toolchains, operator support, and performance characteristics
  • Identify gaps between model requirements and hardware capabilities, and help drive solutions in collaboration with internal teams and external partners
  • Collaborate with and influence silicon vendors and platform partners on roadmap alignment, tooling, and hardware capabilities relevant to Dolby use cases


Hands On Technical Work

  • Conduct technical investigations and experiments, including profiling models, benchmarking inference, and evaluating accuracy latency trade offs
  • Apply and advise on model optimization techniques such as retraining, pruning, quantization, distillation, and hardware aware optimization
  • Guide model porting across frameworks and runtimes (e.g., PyTorch 12 ONNX 12 vendor specific runtimes)
  • Build prototypes and proof of concepts to reduce technical risk prior to full engineering investment


Qualifications

Required

  • Bachelor's or Master's degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
  • Significant hands on experience in AI, machine learning, and embedded software engineering (often acquired over many years of professional practice)
  • Strong software engineering skills, including experience writing production quality code and working with version control, testing, build systems, and software delivery pipelines
  • Experience with at least one major AI/ML framework (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX, ONNX) and the ability to learn additional frameworks as needed
  • Hands on experience deploying optimized ML models (e.g., quantization, pruning, distillation, operator fusion)
  • Experience with edge or on device ML, including awareness of constraints such as latency, power, memory, and thermal limits
  • Familiarity with CPU, GPU, NPU, and DSP architectures and their associated toolchains (e.g., Qualcomm Hexagon/QNN, MediaTek APU/NeuroPilot, ARM Ethos, Apple Neural Engine)
  • Experience in audio, video, signal processing, media codecs, or closely related technical domains


Strongly Preferred

  • Ability to work across abstraction layers, from model architecture to operator level hardware performance
  • Experience defining technical strategy and influencing cross functional teams through expertise and collaboration
  • Demonstrated experience shipping ML models to production on resource constrained devices (e.g., mobile, embedded, automotive, wearables)


Nice to Have

  • Experience with real time audio/video inference pipelines (e.g., streaming inference, causal models, latency sensitive processing)
  • Familiarity with Dolby technologies (such as Atmos, Vision, or AC 4) or comparable media standards
  • Experience with generative AI models in the audio or video domain
  • Contributions to open source ML tools or peer reviewed research


What This Role Is Not

  • This is not a pure research role; the focus is on translating research into production ready solutions
  • This is not an MLOps, LLM only, or infrastructure focused role
  • This role does not center on integrating third party APIs; the work involves developing proprietary models
  • This is not a people management role, though the position involves technical leadership and influence


The San Francisco/Bay Area base salary range for this full-time position is $152,000 - $209,000, which can vary if outside this location,plus bonus, benefits, and some roles may also include equity. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. Within the range, individual pay is determined by work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, competencies, experience, market demands, internal parity, and relevant education or training. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range and perks and benefits for your location during the hiring process.

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About Dolby Laboratories

Dolby Laboratories, Inc. creates audio and imaging technologies that transform entertainment and communications at the cinema, at home, at work, and on mobile devices. The company develops and licenses its audio technologies, such as AAC & HE-AAC, a digital audio codec solution used for TVs, set-top boxes (STBs), personal computers (PCs), gaming consoles, mobile devices, and digital radio; AVC, a digital video codec with high bandwidth efficiency used in media devices; Dolby AC-4, an audio coding technology that delivers new audio experiences to a range of playback devices; and Dolby Atmos technology for home theaters, cinemas, device speakers, mobile devices, and headphones. Its audio technologies also comprise Dolby Digital, a digital audio coding technology that provides multichannel sound in the home; Dolby Digital Plus, a digital audio coding technology that delivers audio quality for streaming, downloaded, and broadcast content; Dolby TrueHD, a digital audio coding technology for content providers; Dolby Vision, an imaging technology for cinema, digital TV, and other consumer devices; and HEVC, a digital video codec with high bandwidth efficiency to support delivery of Ultra HD and other video content. In addition, the company designs and manufactures audio and imaging products, such as digital cinema servers, Dolby Cinema audio products, and other products for the film production, cinema, television broadcast, and entertainment industries. Further, it offers services to support theatrical and television production for cinema exhibition, broadcast, and home entertainment. The company serves film studios, content creators, post-production facilities, cinema operators, broadcasters, and video game designers. Dolby Laboratories, Inc. was founded in 1965 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California.
Learn more about Dolby Laboratories
Size
2,368 employees
Market Cap
$6.5 billion
Industry
Consumer Technology
Net Income
$317.8 million
Founded
1965
5 Year Trend
+3%
Revenue
$1.2 billion
NASDAQ
DLB
* Ladders Estimates

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