Research Engineer/Research Scientist (AI)

TL;DR

Research Engineer/Research Scientist (AI): Developing advanced audio ML systems, including codecs, large-scale speech, and audio diffusion models, with an accent on incorporating continuous signals into LLMs. Focus on designing novel architectures, scaling audio datasets, and optimizing end-to-end conversational AI systems for naturalness, steerability, and safety.

Location: Hybrid in San Francisco, CA, Seattle, WA, or New York City, NY. Expectation to be in one of the offices at least 25% of the time. Visa sponsorship is available.

Salary: $350,000 - $500,000 USD

Company

hirify.global is a public benefit corporation focused on creating reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems for societal benefit.

What you will do

• Develop audio codecs and representations for 48 kHz stereo audio.
• Source and synthesize high-quality audio data at large scale.
• Train large-scale speech language models and audio diffusion models.
• Develop novel architectures for incorporating continuous signals into LLMs.
• Build advanced steerable systems for end-to-end conversational AI.
• Optimize latency and inference throughput for deployed streaming audio systems.

Requirements

• Hands-on experience with training audio models (e.g., speech-to-speech, translation, recognition, text-to-speech, generative audio).
• Comfortable working across abstraction levels, from signal processing to large-scale model training.
• Deep expertise with JAX, PyTorch, or large-scale distributed training.
• Ability to debug performance issues across the full ML stack.
• Clear communication and effective collaboration skills.
• Passion for building natural, steerable, and safe conversational AI.

Nice to have

• Experience with large language model pretraining and finetuning.
• Training diffusion models for image and audio generation.
• Reinforcement learning for large language models and diffusion models.
• End-to-end system optimization, including kernel optimization.
• Experience with GPUs, Kubernetes, PyTorch, or distributed training infrastructure.

Culture & Benefits

• Work as a single cohesive team on large-scale research efforts with a focus on impact.
• Collaborative environment with frequent research discussions.
• Competitive compensation and benefits, including optional equity donation matching.
• Generous vacation and parental leave policies.
• Flexible working hours and a lovely office space for collaboration.