Zack Hodari
Research Engineer at Sesame
London, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolZack Hodari is a research engineer with 11 years of experience specializing in speech synthesis, prosody, and large generative speech models, holding a PhD from the University of Edinburgh. He has driven production-impacting research at Amazon (improving audiobook expressivity with LLMs), Google (prosody with transformers), and Papercup (AI dubbing and speech-to-speech translation), and now builds conversational companions at Sesame. Comfortable spanning the full ML stack, he combines model design, data quality, and product-focused research as a tech lead to deliver user-facing improvements. Zack has published at top conferences, is an inventor on submitted patents, and frequently speaks publicly—including invited keynotes and a Three Minute Thesis finalist slot. He also brings teaching experience, having designed and delivered a master’s-level ML course and taught hundreds of students to build speech synthesis systems. A less obvious strength is his track record of translating deep academic work into measurable product goals reported at executive levels.
11 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Generative models for text-to-speech synthesis, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Generative models for text-to-speech synthesis at The University of EdinburghBachelor’s Degree Computer Science, Bachelor’s Degree Computer Science at Durham University
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (58)
speech-to-text10
whisper10
text-to-speech10
speech-synthesis10
automatic-speech-recognition10
location10
keras10
timestamps10
merlin10
speech10
asr10
theano10
speaker-diarization9
python9
machine-learning9
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
ZackHodari/morgana
May 2019 - Aug 2020
Contributions:3 releases, 77 commits, 24 pushes in 1 year 2 months
ZackHodari/MScR
Mar 2017 - Aug 2017
Contributions:195 pushes, 1 branch in 5 months
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.