Machine Learning Researcher, Audio

The role

You will work on foundational research and development across speech-to-text, large language models, neural audio codecs, and text-to-speech. You will design new modeling approaches, conduct experiments, and collaborate with engineering teams to deploy models into production.

What you will do

• Design and train large scale text-to-speech models.
• Develop neural audio codec-based TTS architectures.
• Improve prosody modeling, question inflection, emotional expression, and multi-speaker robustness.
• Optimize for real-time, low-latency inference in production.
• Build and fine-tune large scale ASR systems.
• Research and implement neural audio codecs.
• Curate and process massive audio datasets.
• Design staged training curricula and data filtering strategies.
• Scale training across distributed GPU clusters.
• Design ablation studies and validate ideas through experiments.

Required qualifications

• Experience with self-supervised learning, multimodal modeling, or generative modeling.
• Ability to derive new formulations and implement them efficiently.
• Hands-on experience building or scaling TTS, STT, or neural audio codec systems.
• Familiarity with large scale speech datasets and real-world audio variability.
• Strong intuition for audio quality, prosody, and conversational dynamics.
• Experience training and serving large models on modern accelerators.
• Knowledge of inference optimization techniques, including quantization, kernel optimization, and memory efficiency.
• Understanding of real-time constraints in telephony or streaming environments.
• Track record of designing controlled experiments and meaningful ablations.
• Comfortable working with both offline benchmarks and live production metrics.
• Ability to move quickly from hypothesis to validation.
• Comfortable in fast-moving startup environments.

Nice to have

• Experience with large scale distributed training.
• Research publications or open source contributions in speech or language AI.
• Background in real-time speech systems or telephony.
• PhD in ML, AI, or a related field, or equivalent research impact.

Benefits

• Healthcare, dental, vision, all the good stuff
• Meaningful equity in a fast-growing company
• Every tool you need to succeed
• Beautiful office in Levi's Plaza, SF with rooftop views

Before you apply

• All new hires are required to complete the Form I-9, and employment will be verified through E-Verify as part of the onboarding process.

About the company

Bland.com is a fast-growing team based in San Francisco that aims to empower enterprises to build AI phone agents at scale. They have raised $100 million from leading Silicon Valley investors.