Research Engineer

Open Posted on Jul 21, 2026

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)
YC Backed

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