Research, Audio Expertise
$350k - $475k • San Francisco • FullTime
Posted 2mo ago
Job Location
San Francisco
Tech Stack
Remote Work Policy
On-site
Employment Type
FullTime
Categories
AI Research Engineer
About the job
Thinking Machines is seeking researchers to advance the frontier of audio capabilities within AI. This role focuses on exploring how audio models can enable more natural and efficient communication and collaboration, preserving more information and capturing user intent. It's a highly collaborative position, working with researchers, engineers, and designers to shape the fundamental capabilities of AI systems. The role blends fundamental research with practical engineering, requiring proficiency in writing high-performance code and analyzing technical reports. It's ideal for individuals who enjoy both deep theoretical exploration and hands-on experimentation.
Responsibilities
- Own research projects on audio training, low-latency inference, and conversational responsiveness.
- Design and train large-scale models that natively support audio input and output.
- Investigate scaling behavior, including the impact of data, model size, and compute on capability and efficiency.
- Build and maintain audio data pipelines for training and evaluation.
- Collaborate with data and infrastructure teams to scale audio training efficiently across distributed systems.
- Publish and present research, sharing code, datasets, and insights to advance the field.
Requirements
- Ability to design, run, and analyze experiments with demonstrated research judgment and empirical rigor.
- Understanding of machine learning fundamentals, large-scale training, and distributed compute environments.
- Proficiency in Python and familiarity with at least one deep learning framework (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX).
- Comfortable with debugging distributed training and writing scalable code.
- Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience in a related quantitative discipline.
- Clarity in written communication of complex technical concepts.
- Strong grasp of probability, statistics, and ML fundamentals.
- Experience with real-time inference, streaming architectures, or optimization for low latency.
- Prior experience training or evaluating large-scale audio or multimodal models.
- Demonstrated experience in audio or speech modeling (e.g., ASR, TTS, self-supervised audio learning).
- PhD in a related discipline or equivalent industry research experience.
Benefits
- Generous health, dental, and vision benefits
- Unlimited PTO
- Paid parental leave
- Relocation support