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Role description

Founding ML Research Engineer

Kalpa Labs logoKalpa LabsYC F25
Founding roleAI-native
TypeFull-time
WorkplaceOn-site
SponsorshipSponsors visas
Salary$180,000–$250,000
LocationSan Francisco, CA
Engineering

We’re hiring a Founding ML Research Engineer to 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).

This is an in-person role: we work six days a week from our San Francisco office.

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.

Relevant archetypes

Apply on Y Combinator
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Company info

Kalpa Labs logo

Kalpa Labs

Scaling Generalist Speech models

Pre-seedYC F25
HQSan Francisco, United States
Size1–10 employees
IndustryTechnology, Information and Media
Unlock human wisdom
ThesisTermsPrivacy
Funding
  • Pre-seed · Dec 3, 2025

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