Founding ML Research Engineer - Training Infrastructure

at Kalpa Labs — Scaling Generalist Speech models

San Francisco, CA, USFull-time3+ years$140K - $200KYC-F25

What the role involves

We’re hiring a Founding ML Research Engineer to build the pre-training and post-training infrastructure for training some of the largest speech models in the world. You’ll own the training stack end-to-end with a small team, tons of compute, high autonomy, and the mandate to push toward 100B+ scale as we scale generalist speech models.

What you’ll do

Design and implement a production-grade training stack for 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, and experiment tracking.

Own distributed training: performance profiling, stability, fault tolerance, checkpointing, resumption, and high-throughput I/O.

What we’re looking for

Strong ML systems and engineering depth (distributed training, performance, reliability).

Practical experience training large models (speech/audio is a plus but not required; language/vision experience is also relevant).

Comfort operating in ambiguity: you can spec, build, debug, and ship.

To apply

Reply with your best paper / blog post / arXiv link and a short note on what you built and what you want to build next.

About Kalpa Labs

We're building the next frontier of speech models. Generalist speech models that unlock in-context learning & strong instruction following for speech models alongside unifying existing speech capabilities like speech to text, text to speech, voice cloning, etc.

Full Kalpa Labs profile

Similar Engineering, Machine learning elsewhere

jobo is a browser extension. Open this on a computer to install it.