Founding ML Research Engineer - Training Infrastructure (San Francisco)

Join to apply for the Founding ML Research Engineer - Training Infrastructure role at Kalpa Labs (YC F25)

This range is provided by Kalpa Labs (YC F25). Your actual pay will be based on your skills and experience — talk with your recruiter to learn more.

Base pay range

$140,000.00/yr - $200,000.00/yr

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.

Seniority level

Entry level

Employment type

Full-time

Job function

Engineering and Information Technology

Industries

Technology, Information and Media

Referrals increase your chances of interviewing at Kalpa Labs (YC F25) by 2x

Get notified about new Research Engineer jobs in San Francisco, CA .