Founding ML Research Engineer - Conversational AI

Stealth Startup; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Stealth Startup in San Francisco, CA, is seeking a Founding Machine Learning Research Engineer to advance real-time AI. You will explore state-of-the-art approaches across large language models (LLMs), speech models, and multimodal AI to build human-like voice agents capable of operating in complex real-world environments.

You will design new evaluation methodologies, prototype innovative systems, and improve reasoning, latency, and conversational intelligence.

Qualifications

• Master's degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, or a related field is required.
• PhD is preferred, or equivalent research-level industry experience.
• Strong proficiency with PyTorch is expected.

Responsibilities

• Research and develop novel techniques across LLMs, speech models, and multimodal AI.
• Improve reasoning capabilities, response latency, conversational quality, and system robustness.
• Explore new training paradigms, architectures, and inference techniques.
• Design, train, and iterate on machine learning models and supporting pipelines.
• Rapidly prototype research ideas and validate them through experimentation.
• Optimize models for production performance and scalability.
• Design innovative evaluation frameworks for conversational AI.
• Create datasets, benchmarks, and metrics reflecting real-world customer interactions.
• Measure model quality across latency, reasoning, speech quality, and user satisfaction.
• Partner with engineering teams to deploy research innovations into production.
• Develop methodologies that incorporate human evaluation into model training.
• Improve conversational quality through reinforcement learning and human feedback.
• Build feedback loops that continuously enhance AI performance.

Skills

PyTorch

LLM research

Speech recognition

Mathematics for ML

Education

Master's degree in CS/AI/ML or related field

PhD preferred or equivalent research-level experience

Job description

Stealth Startup in San Francisco, CA, is seeking a Founding Machine Learning Research Engineer to advance real-time AI. You will explore state-of-the-art approaches across large language models (LLMs), speech models, and multimodal AI to build human-like voice agents capable of operating in complex real-world environments.

You will design new evaluation methodologies, prototype innovative systems, and improve reasoning, latency, and conversational intelligence.