At a glance
- Pay
- $150k – $220k/yr
- Type
- Full Time
- Location
- San Francisco, California
- Posted
- Jul 21, 2026
- Company size
- Startup (1-50)
- Industry
- Technology/Software
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
Kalpa Labs
Technology/Software · Startup (1-50)
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