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Research Engineer

Compensation
$180,000–$250,000/year

Job Description

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 autonom, 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
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Job Details

Category
Aerospace Engineering
Employment Type
Full Time
Location
San Francisco, CA
Posted
Last updated
Aug 7, 2026, 05:42 PM
Compensation
$180,000 - $250,000 per year

About Kalpa Labs

Kalpa Labs is building generalist speech models that unlock in-context learning & strong instruction.

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Research Engineer
Kalpa Labs
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