Founding ML Research Engineer

San Francisco, CA
Full-time
Visa Sponsorship

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.

About Kalpa Labs

Scaling Generalist Speech models

Required skills

Machine Learning

Interested?

Let me introduce you to the founders.

Skip the process

Job details

Salary

$180,000 - $250,000

Equity

0.5% - 1%

Location

San Francisco, CA

Experience

3+ years

Company

NameKalpa Labs
IndustryB2B
Team Size2

Funding

Total raised

$500K

Last stage

Seed

Investors

Y Combinator

Founders

Gautam Jha

Gautam Jha

Co-Founder & CTO

LinkedIn
Prashant Shishodia

Prashant Shishodia

Co-Founder & CEO

LinkedIn

What happens next.

No applications, no recruiter spam. Just the intro.

01

Confirm the fit

A few questions to make sure this role is the right shape for you. Two minutes.

02

I pitch you to the company

I write the intro, send it to the founder, and handle the back-and-forth.

03

A meeting lands on your calendar

If they’re a yes, I book the chat. You show up — that’s the whole job-hunt.