NLP Engineer - Narrative Systems

Pocket Entertainment is a global leader in immersive audio storytelling, creating richly produced narrative experiences that engage millions of listeners across the world.

With over 100 billion minutes streamed annually, an average of 120 minutes of daily listening time, and more than 6 billion total audio plays, Pocket FM is on a mission to build the world's largest AI-powered audio streaming platform, powered by a thriving community of 250,000+ creators. The platform continues to see rapid growth in the US and India, with strong expansion momentum across Europe and LATAM.

Our mission is to redefine the future of storytelling by empowering writers and creators worldwide with next-generation AI tools, from story generation co-pilots and seamless multilingual adaptations to expressive voice synthesis and creative tooling for image and video generation. As an AI-first company, we're building and deploying proprietary generative AI models that power our entire value chain, spanning content creation, curation, marketing, distribution, and monetization.

We are looking for a NLP Engineer with a strong foundation in computer science and artificial intelligence to bridge storytelling and technology. This role focuses on designing, analyzing, and optimizing narrative structures using computational methods, enabling scalable, engaging, and personalized storytelling experiences.

You will work at the intersection of narrative theory, linguistics, and machine learning to power next-generation storytelling systems.

Key Responsibilities

Narrative Modeling & Analysis:

• Develop computational models of narrative structure (plot arcs, character development, pacing, etc.)
• Analyze large corpora of stories to extract patterns, tropes, and engagement signals
• Apply narratology frameworks (e.g., Propp, Todorov, Freytag) in data-driven systems

AI-Driven Story Generation

• Design and improve systems for automated or assisted story generation (LLMs, narrative engines)
• Build pipelines for plot generation, dialogue generation, and story coherence evaluation
• Fine-tune language models for narrative quality, tone, and genre adherence

Linguistic & Semantic Processing

• Apply NLP techniques to understand discourse, sentiment, and narrative flow
• Work on entity tracking, coreference resolution, and story consistency
• Develop tools for narrative summarization, classification, and tagging

User Engagement & Personalization

• Analyze listener/reader behavior to refine narrative strategies
• Build models that adapt storytelling based on user preferences and engagement patterns
• Collaborate with product teams to optimize content retention and immersion

Collaboration with Creative Teams

• Translate narrative insights into actionable guidelines for writers and content creators
• Co-develop story frameworks, templates, and AI-assisted writing tools
• Evaluate and improve AI-generated content for quality and originality

What we're looking for:

• MA/MSc or PhD in Computational Linguistics, Digital Humanities (NLP focus), Cognitive Science, or CS with a narrative/discourse thesis
• Strong NLP foundations
• Genuine understanding of narrative theory, not just as background
• Experience with story generation systems, interactive/game narrative, or branching dialogue
• Familiarity with knowledge graphs or narrative ontologies
• Nice to have: Published work or projects in narrative AI or computational narratology