HOME AI & Research Founding ML Research Engineer
  • Kalpa Labs
  • San Francisco, CA
  • Full-Time
  • 69 days ago
  • $180,000 – $250,000
Kalpa Labs VERIFIED EMPLOYER

Founding ML Research Engineer.

AI & Research Full-Time

Founding ML Research Engineer: our view in 3 lines...

  • The Role:This role is for an ML research engineer working on generalist audio models across pre-training, post-training and evaluation.
  • The Person:The person will research multimodal architectures and codecs, build large-scale speech model training, and create scalable data and compute pipelines for curation, filtering, mixing, tokenization and evaluation.
  • Requirements:The ideal candidate has experience pre-training and post-training large neural networks, with strong ML systems and engineering depth in distributed training, performance and reliability.

About the role

We’re hiring a Founding ML Research Engineer to work work through the full stack across data, pre-training, post-training & evals for training Generalist Audio Models. You’ll work through the entire stack with small team, tons of compute, high autonomy, and see your research ideas making it to production within a week(s).

What you’ll do

  • Research better multi-modal architectures & codecs that are efficient across both spoken speech & general audio.
  • Post-train audio models to have LLM like instruction following & in-context learning but over both text and audio.
  • Build large-scale speech model pre-training and post-training (SFT/RLHF-style, distillation, preference optimization, etc.).
  • Build scalable data + compute pipelines: dataset curation, filtering, mixing, tokenization/feature pipelines, evaluation harnesses.
  • Look at lots of data & hear lots of audio.

What we’re looking for

  • Industry/Academia experience pre-training / post-training large neural networks; speech/audio is a plus but not required, language/vision experience is also relevant.
  • Strong ML systems and engineering depth (distributed training, performance, reliability).
  • Comfort operating in ambiguity: you can spec, build, debug, and ship.
  • A hunger to always ask - what would the next frontier look like?

To apply
Share arxiv links to papers that: you co-authored, you enjoyed reading, you found surprising.

Published July 21, 2026
Location San Francisco, CA
Category AI & Research  
Job Type Full-Time