Founding ML Research Engineer - Training Infrastructure

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.

$/yr - $/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.

• 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.

• 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.

Reply with your best paper / blog post / arXiv link and a short note on what you built and what you want to build next.

Entry level

Full-time

Engineering and Information Technology

Technology, Information and Media

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

Apply BELOW