Research Scientist Intern, Multimodal LLM and Speech-to-Speech Translation (PhD)

Meta; Redmond; On-site; AUD 56,000 - 84,000; Full time

Job summary

Meta Reality Labs Research invites interns to advance multimodal large language models and speech-to-speech translation for AR/VR experiences. Interns will explore models integrating audio, speech, vision, and language, and collaborate with researchers to showcase real-world potential.

Internship durations range from 12 to 24 weeks with multiple start dates; applicants should be pursuing a PhD in a related field and have strong Python and ML framework experience, plus a track record of

Qualifications

• PhD candidate or in progress in a STEM field relevant to ML/AI.
• 3+ years Python programming experience.
• 3+ years with PyTorch or TensorFlow.
• 2+ years in speech, NLP, multimodal or audio-visual learning.
• Must have work authorization at hire and during employment.
• Experience with multimodal LLMs and speech translation is preferred.
• Publications in top venues (NeurIPS/ICML/ACL/CVPR/etc.).
• Strong software engineering, internships, or OSS contributions.
• Ability to communicate across disciplines.
• Intent to return to degree program after internship.

Responsibilities

• Investigate research questions in multimodal LLMs and S2ST.
• Develop and evaluate novel models across audio, speech, vision, and language.
• Collaborate with researchers and engineers to demonstrate applicability.

Skills

Python programming

ML frameworks (PyTorch/TensorFlow)

Speech/NLP/Multimodal models

Work authorization

Multimodal LLM research

Speech translation

Speech foundation models

Distributed training

Model evaluation

Publications

Open-source contributions

Cross-disciplinary collaboration

Pursue degree after internship

Education

PhD in Computer Science / AI / ML / EE / Speech

Job description

The Meta Reality Labs Research team brings together researchers, developers, and engineers to build the future of augmented and virtual reality. Our research spans the technologies that enable next-generation AR glasses and VR headsets, with the goal of transforming how people interact with their surroundings and connect with one another.

The Reality Labs Research audio team develops technologies that redefine human hearing and communication. We seek to help people understand the world around them, communicate in challenging listening environments, and connect across languages. Learn more about our research here.

We are seeking Research Scientist Interns to advance multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) for next-generation wearable and AR/VR experiences. Research opportunities include models that integrate audio, speech, vision, and language for multimodal understanding and reasoning; conversational speech models; and streaming speech translation that preserves meaning, speaker characteristics, and expressive prosody.

Interns will investigate research questions in one or more of these areas, develop and evaluate novel models, and collaborate with researchers and engineers to demonstrate their potential in real-world applications.

Our internships are twelve (12) to twenty-four (24) weeks long, with various start dates throughout the year.

• Currently has, or is in the process of obtaining, a PhD degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Electrical Engineering, Signal Processing, Computational Linguistics, or a related STEM field
• 3+ years of experience programming in Python or a similar language
• 3+ years of experience with machine learning frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow
• 2+ years of experience developing computational models in one or more of the following areas: speech processing, natural language processing, multimodal learning, or audio-visual learning
• Must obtain work authorization in the country of employment at the time of hire and maintain ongoing work authorization during employment
• Research experience in one or more of the following: Multimodal large language models, including audio-language or audio-visual-language understanding, alignment, and reasoning.
• Speech-to-speech translation, simultaneous translation, multilingual speech modeling, or streaming speech generation.
• Speech foundation models, neural audio codecs, speech tokenization, or expressive speech synthesis
• Experience pretraining or fine-tuning large models using distributed training and large-scale datasets
• Experience evaluating multimodal reasoning or speech translation, including translation accuracy, speech naturalness, speaker similarity, and streaming latency
• Demonstrated research contributions through publications at venues such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, EMNLP, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ICASSP, or Interspeech
• Demonstrated software engineering experience through internships, research projects, or contributions to open-source repositories
• Experience collaborating and communicating across disciplines
• Intent to return to a degree program after completing the internship/co-op