Founding ML Research Engineer - Real-Time Conversational AI

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

Job summary

Stealth Startup is seeking a Founding Machine Learning Research Engineer to advance real-time AI across LLMs, speech models, and multimodal systems. You will shape evaluation methodologies, prototype innovations, and improve latency, reasoning, and conversational intelligence for production-scale deployments.

You will explore new training paradigms, design pipelines, and collaborate with engineers to translate research into scalable solutions used by customers.

Qualifications

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

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 that reflect real-world customer interactions.
• Measure model quality across latency, reasoning, speech quality, and user satisfaction.
• Partner closely with engineering teams to deploy research innovations into production.
• Improve conversational quality through reinforcement learning and human feedback.
• Stay current with cutting-edge ML research.

Skills

ML research

LLMs

ASR

Mathematical foundation

PyTorch

Education

Master's degree in Computer Science/AI/ML

PhD preferred

Tools

PyTorch

Job description

Stealth Startup is seeking a Founding Machine Learning Research Engineer to advance real-time AI across LLMs, speech models, and multimodal systems. You will shape evaluation methodologies, prototype innovations, and improve latency, reasoning, and conversational intelligence for production-scale deployments.

You will explore new training paradigms, design pipelines, and collaborate with engineers to translate research into scalable solutions used by customers.