Padmi
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Kalpa Labs

generalist speech models · conversational AI

Founding ML Research Engineer - Training Infrastructure

San Francisco Bay Area · Onsite$140k–$200k/yrPosted 7 days ago
Machine learningStaff+Full TimeSponsorship mentioned
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Opens the source posting on ycombinator.com

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About the role

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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.