Research Engineer - Audio & Speech Models

Department: R&D - Engineering

Location: San Francisco

Employment Type: FullTime

Zyphra is an artificial intelligence company based in San Francisco, California.

The Role:

As a Research Engineer - Audio & Speech Models, you will be a core contributor on Zyphra’s Audio Team, building the next generation of open-source autoencoders, ASR, TTS, SSL, and speech-to-speech models. You will be deeply involved in the entire model training process, from data gathering and processing to designing novel architectures and training methodologies.

You’ll Work Across:

• Large-scale audio training runs

• Performance optimization of our training stack

• Audio dataset collection, processing, and evaluation

• Architecture and training methodology ablations and improvements

What We're Looking For / Requirements:

• Strong research taste and intuition. The ability to work through a research project from conception to execution to write-up.

• Strong implementation and prototyping ability (can take an idea from conception to experimentation quickly)

• The ability to work well with others in a high-paced research setting

• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, and can work effectively on both research and engineering implementation at scale

Qualifications / Additional Skills:

• Expertise and intuition for training models in the audio domain, including text-to-speech, ASR, speech-to-speech, speech-emotion-recognition, or other models

• Experience in training audio autoencoders

• Understanding of signal processing, especially of audio signals

• Experience with diffusion models, consistency models, or GANs

• Experience with training on large-scale (multi-node) GPU clusters

• Strong grasp of proper experimental methodology for running rigorous ablations and other hypothesis testing

• Understanding of and interest in large-scale, highly parallel data processing pipelines

• Proficiency with PyTorch and Python

• Experience contributing to large pre-existing codebases and rapidly getting up to speed

• Previously published machine learning research in well-respected venues

• Postgraduate degree in a scientific subject (Computer Science, EE/EECS, Mathematics, Physics, Machine Learning)

Why Work at Zyphra:

• Our research methodology is grounded in methodical, step-by-step approaches to ambitious goals. Both deep research and engineering excellence are equally valued

• We strongly value new and crazy ideas and are very willing to bet big on new ideas

• We move as quickly as we can; we aim to minimize the bar to impact as low as possible

• We all enjoy what we do and love discussing AI

Benefits and Perks:

• Comprehensive medical, dental, vision, and FSA plans

• Competitive compensation and 401(k) plan

• Relocation and immigration support on a case-by-case basis

• In-office snacks and meals provided

• Unlimited PTO and company holidays

• In-person team in San Francisco with a collaborative, high-energy environment