Machine Learning Research Intern 2027

The role

You will own a research direction end-to-end by identifying problems, designing experiments, and developing novel methods. You will work on the voice AI stack from audio understanding to audio output.

What you will do

• Identify high-leverage research problems across the voice AI stack
• Design and run rigorous experiments to analyze architectural trade-offs
• Curate massive training datasets and execute experiments on data quality
• Work directly with research scientists and engineers to move from prototype to production
• Build training pipelines, evaluation frameworks, and tooling

Required qualifications

• Track record of original work
• Proficiency in PyTorch (or JAX)
• Ability to implement models cleanly from papers
• Fluency in the math, probability, optimization, and linear algebra underlying model behavior
• Clear, precise written and verbal communication

Nice to have

• Research experience in speech, audio, or language modeling (ASR, TTS, LLMs, codec models)
• Familiarity with generative modeling techniques: diffusion, flow matching, or autoregressive models
• Experience with RLHF or preference optimization
• Competitive programming or olympiad background
• Publications or preprints at venues like NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, Interspeech, ICASSP, or ACL

Benefits

• Salary and equity
• Free breakfast, lunch, and dinner provided in the office
• Regular off-sites and team celebrations

About the company

Phonic is the speech-to-speech model company. Their models power voice agents on six continents for companies like Ashby, Maven AGI, and a Fortune 50 IT infrastructure company.