Research Scientist Intern, Audio AI (PhD)

Meta; Menlo Park (CA); On-site; USD 85,000 - 141,000; Full time

Job summary

Meta Media Foundation Core Audio internship focuses on advancing audio, speech, and ML technologies used across WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, Facebook, and Meta AI experiences. Interns work on one focused problem at the intersection of ML, audio processing, and efficient systems.

Internships last 12–24 weeks with multiple start dates; you will build and evaluate models, collaborate with researchers and engineers, and contribute to potential product impact.

Qualifications

• PhD in Computer Science, AI, NLP, Speech, or related field.
• Must have work authorization for country of employment.
• Experience with Python, C++, Java or similar languages.
• Experience with PyTorch or TensorFlow.
• Familiarity with ML architectures and research methods.

Responsibilities

• Perform research to advance audio, speech, multimodal, and ML technologies.
• Design, train, and evaluate models for audio applications like enhancement or compression.
• Build reproducible evaluation pipelines with objective metrics and listening tests.
• Collaborate with researchers, software engineers, and cross-functional partners; communicate plans and results.

Skills

Python

C++

Java

Deep learning

ML systems

Education

PhD in CS / AI / NLP / CV / Speech

Tools

PyTorch

TensorFlow

Job description

Summary:

Meta was built to help people connect and share, and our technologies play a critical role in how people around the world communicate, create, and experience media. A research internship at Meta offers the opportunity to advance the state of the art while working on systems used across global products.Meta is seeking Research Scientist Interns to join the Media Foundation Core Audio team. We develop audio technologies used across WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, Facebook, and Meta AI experiences, spanning real-time calling, conversational AI, voice and media messaging, Live, and video-on-demand.Interns will work on one focused research problem at the intersection of machine learning, audio and speech signal processing, human perception, and efficient systems. Potential areas include streaming speech and audio enhancement for calling and conversational AI; restoration and super-resolution for creator media and video; neural audio codecs and compression for speech, music, and general audio; perceptual and context-aware quality metrics; multimodal evaluation; and efficient on-device or server inference through model architecture, distillation, quantization, and runtime optimization. Projects will be selected based on the intern’s expertise and current team priorities.The work combines research depth with real-world constraints such as latency, bitrate, compute, memory, power, robustness, and safe fallback. Interns will collaborate with research scientists, software engineers, and product partners to define the problem, build and evaluate solutions, and identify a credible path from research result to product impact.Our internships are twelve (12) to sixteen (16), or twenty-four (24) weeks long, with various start dates throughout the year.

Required Skills:

Research Scientist Intern, Audio AI (PhD) Responsibilities:

1. Perform research to advance audio, speech, multimodal, and machine learning technologies.

2. Design, train, and evaluate models for one or more audio applications, such as enhancement, restoration, compression, generation, or quality understanding.

3. Build reproducible evaluation pipelines using objective metrics, human listening tests, robustness analysis, and system-level measurements.

4. Analyze and improve model quality, efficiency, latency, scalability, and stability under practical device, network, and serving constraints.

5. Collaborate with researchers, software engineers, and cross-functional partners

6. communicate research plans, progress, tradeoffs, and results.

7. Publish research results and contribute to research that can be applied to Meta product development.

Minimum Qualifications:

Minimum Qualifications:

1. Currently has or is in the process of obtaining a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, Speech Recognition, Sentiment Analysis, Computer Vision, or relevant technical field

2. Must obtain work authorization in country of employment at the time of hire and maintain ongoing work authorization during employment

3. Experience with Python, C++, C, Java or other related language

4. Experience with deep learning frameworks such as Pytorch or Tensorflow

5. Familiarity with machine learning and common deep learning architectures

Preferred Qualifications:

Preferred Qualifications:

1. Intent to return to the degree program after the completion of the internship/co-op

2. Proven track record of solid research achievements as demonstrated by grants, fellowships, patents, as well as publications at leading AI conferences such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, EMNLP and KDD

3. Prior research or project experience in one or more of the following areas: reinforcement learning, pre-training and supervised fine-tuning of large language models, sequence modeling, diffusion models, and their applications in recommendation systems

4. Demonstrated software development experience via tech internships, work experience, coding competitions, or widely used contributions in open source machine-learning repositories

5. Experience working and communicating cross functionally in a fast-paced team environment. Ideal candidates should have the ability to quickly understand and identify the research opportunities behind real-world applications, select the appropriate ML methods to explore, and proactively drive the iterations based on clear analysis of the current result

Public Compensation:

$7,650/month to $12,667/month + benefits

Industry:

Internet

Equal Opportunity:

Meta is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity and affirmati… (full EEO statement preserved here)

Meta is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities in our recruiting process. If you need any assistance or accommodations due to a disability, please let us know at [e-mail].