Senior Machine Learning Research Engineer

Senior Machine Learning Research Engineer San Francisco, United States | Posted on 09/03/2026 AI Talent Now, LLC is a powerhouse in direct-hire talent acquisition, connecting exceptional talent with industry-leading organizations across IT, Engineering, Financial Services & Fintech, and Manufacturing & Robotics. Headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, we proudly serve clients and candidates nationwide. Job Description AI Talent Now job # ZR 104 We are looking for a Machine Learning Research Engineer with 5+ years of experience (PhD + 1 year industry, or 5 years industry with publications) to own the full lifecycle of ML research and development at the frontier of audio AI. You'll join a fast-growing team backed by NVIDIA and top-tier investors, building cutting-edge speech and audio models that power the data layer for the world's leading AI labs. This is a role for someone who thrives in a research-driven environment, has published at top conferences, and is excited to take end-to-end ownership of novel ML directions — from design and training to deployment and fine-tuning. What will you be doing? Owning full research directions end-to-end — designing, training, deploying, and fine-tuning ML models for speech and audio applications Publishing and advancing the state of the art in speech, audio, and multimodal ML (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR caliber work) Building production-grade inference systems and resilient pipelines that process terabytes of audio data daily Collaborating cross-functionally with operations and engineering teams to gather training/evaluation datasets and improve model quality Setting ML roadmaps and mentoring other engineers as the team scales Requirements Must have 1+ years in industry with full lifecycle ML ownership: design, train, deploy, fine-tune Education: PhD from a top-25 CS program (or 5+ years industry ML research experience without PhD) Baseline Seniority: 5 - 15 years of experience in ML research engineering, with focus on speech/audio/multimodal models using Python and PyTorch Experience at a high-growth startup Research in speech, audio, multimodal, text-to-speech, or related domains Strong Python and PyTorch with production deployment experience Excited to own a research direction end-to-end independently Based in or willing to relocate to San Francisco (in-office) At least 1 year of industry experience (post-PhD) Nice-to-have Experience at a top AI lab or research-focused startup (e.g., DeepMind, xAI, Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta FAIR) Mix of big company and startup experience Education Many publications, especially at NeurIPS, ICML, or ICLR in speech, audio, multimodal, or related areas Many publications, especially at NeurIPS, ICML, or ICLR in speech, audio, multimodal, or related areas Updated Experience training large neural network models #J-18808-Ljbffr AI Talent Now