Research Engineer – Audio & Speech Models

Zyphra is an artificial intelligence company based in Palo Alto, 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 text-to-speech and audio 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

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

• Can rapidly learn new fields and are excited to implement new ideas

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

Bonus Qualifications:

• 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 to make grounded, methodical steps toward 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)

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

• On-site meals prepared by a dedicated culinary team; Thursday Happy Hours

• In-person team in Palo Alto, CA, with a collaborative, high-energy environment