Research Engineer

Phonic, Inc.; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 100,000 - 140,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Top-tier compensation

Free meals

Comprehensive health, dental, and vision

Regular off-sites and team celebrations

401(k) plan

Job summary

Phonic, Inc. in San Francisco is looking for a Research Engineer to work at the intersection of ML research and production engineering. The role involves designing and iterating on models across the voice stack, and working closely with product engineers in a rapid-paced environment.

The ideal candidate should have experience in ML research, be proficient in Python and frameworks like PyTorch or JAX, and thrive in ambiguity. The company offers top-tier compensation and benefits including free meals and healthcare.

Qualifications

• Hands-on experience in ML research or engineering, industry or PhD-level.
• Proficient in Python and frameworks like PyTorch or JAX.
• Experience with ML experiment processes.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement models across the voice stack.
• Build training pipelines and evaluation frameworks.
• Translate research results into production-grade systems.

Skills

ML research experience

Proficiency in Python

Experience with PyTorch or JAX

End-to-end running of ML experiments

Ability to explain research findings

Job description

About Phonic

Phonic is a product and research lab focused on powering the most realistic, human-like voice AI conversations. We've re-thought the entire stack in pursuit of this goal, from models to product, to create voice agents that feel like they truly understand you, respond emotionally and perform agentic tasks with frontier intelligence.

Our team includes top-tier AI researchers, international olympiad medalists, and former founders.

Our customers include companies that are building voice-native AI products in industries such as customer support, healthcare, and logistics.

About the Team

Phonic has a very talent-dense and close-knit team. We collaborate with high trust and are constantly trying to improve how we work to deliver world-class research and product. Everyone takes ownership in what they do and they aren’t afraid to dive in headfirst into new problems. Our team includes top-tier AI researchers, international olympiad medalists, and former founders and we’re fully in-person in our SF office.

About The Role

As a Research Engineer at Phonic, you'll sit at the intersection of cutting-edge ML research and production engineering, working directly on the core systems that make Phonic's voice AI feel genuinely human. You'll design, train, and iterate on models across the voice stack (speech, audio, language, and beyond), while also building the infrastructure and tooling needed to move fast from research idea to deployed product.

This is a role for someone who thrives in ambiguity, moves with urgency, and takes full ownership of problems. You'll work closely with researchers and product engineers in a high trust, in-person environment in our SF office to push the frontier of what voice AI can do.

What You’ll Do

• Design, implement, and iterate on models across the voice stack from audio and speech to language and beyond
• Build the training pipelines, evaluation frameworks, and tooling that let us experiment and iterate quickly
• Translate research results into production-grade systems alongside our engineering team
• Form hypotheses, chase down interesting results, and take ownership over the problems you work on

What You’ll Bring

• Hands‑on experience in ML research or research engineering, industry or PhD‑level academia
• Proficiency in Python and PyTorch (or JAX), and the ability to implement models cleanly from papers
• Experience running ML experiments end‑to‑end: data processing, training, evaluation, and iteration
• Comfort in fast‑moving, ambiguous environments - defining the problem is part of the job
• The ability to clearly explain what you tried, what worked, and why

Nice To Have

• Research experience in speech, audio, or language modeling (ASR, TTS, LLMs, codec models)
• Familiarity with diffusion, flow matching, or autoregressive generative models
• Experience with distributed training, quantization, or inference optimization
• Competitive programming or olympiad background

Benefits

• Top‑tier compensation: in order to get the best talent, we provide salary and equity that recognize your skillset
• Meals: free breakfast, lunch, and dinner provided in the office
• Healthcare: Comprehensive health, dental, and vision
• We have regular off‑sites and team celebrations
• 401(k) – Let us help you plan for the future. We’ve got you covered.