Edge AI Audio ML Intern: KWS & AED on Low-Power Hardware

Syntiant Corp.; Redwood City (CA); On-site; USD 40,000 - 65,000; Part time

Job summary

Syntiant Corp., a leader in AI software and semiconductor solutions, seeks a Machine Learning Intern to support algorithms on keyword spotting and audio event detection models running on ultra-low-power edge hardware.

You will work with senior ML engineers, helping build, evaluate, and improve models that operate within strict memory and power budgets on NDP-class processors, spanning data curation to training and hardware-aware evaluation.

Qualifications

• Pursuing or completed Bachelor’s or Master’s in CS, EE, ML or related field.
• Hands-on experience in deep learning for audio/speech (CNNs/RNNs on spectrogram/time-series data).
• Proficiency in Python and a DL framework (TensorFlow/Keras preferred; PyTorch acceptable).
• Familiarity with audio signal processing fundamentals (spectrograms, mel filterbanks, feature extraction).

Responsibilities

• Support development and evaluation of KWS and AED models, including single-stage and cascaded architectures.
• Assist with audio pipeline and feature extraction work — filterbank design, log-mel, PCEN frontends, and training/eval issues.
• Help design and prune CNN architectures to fit hardware constraints (8-bit quantization, fixed input shapes, limited parameter budgets).
• Build and run false-accept diagnostic tooling — categorized probe sets, confusion analysis, Grad-CAM/occlusion visualizations.
• Contribute to hard-negative mining and data augmentation strategies to reduce false accepts.
• Help plan and track data collection efforts, structuring datasets by acoustic category and maintaining logs.
• Analyze model run results across experiments and summarize findings for the team.
• Collaborate with ML, DSP, and hardware/firmware engineers to validate models against deployment conditions.

Skills

Python

TensorFlow/Keras

PyTorch

Audio processing

Model evaluation

Quantization

Edge ML

Communication

Education

Bachelor’s or Master’s in CS/EE/ML

Job description

Syntiant Corp., a leader in AI software and semiconductor solutions, seeks a Machine Learning Intern to support algorithms on keyword spotting and audio event detection models running on ultra-low-power edge hardware.

You will work with senior ML engineers, helping build, evaluate, and improve models that operate within strict memory and power budgets on NDP-class processors, spanning data curation to training and hardware-aware evaluation.