{"id":1262453,"url":"https://alion.io/job/kalpa-labs-founding-ml-research-engineer","title":"Founding ML Research Engineer","company":{"id":3779632,"name":"Kalpa Labs","domain":"kalpalabs.ai","url":"https://alion.io/company/kalpa-labs","size_band":"11-50","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Work at a Startup","truth_index":null},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"middle","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["San Francisco, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":180000,"max":250000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":250000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":3,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":true,"technologies":[{"name":"In-Context Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Knowledge Distillation","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"LLM Evaluation","optional":false},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Model Distillation","optional":false},{"name":"Multimodal AI","optional":false},{"name":"Post-training","optional":false},{"name":"Pre-training","optional":false},{"name":"RLHF","optional":false},{"name":"SFT","optional":false},{"name":"Tokenization","optional":false},{"name":"arXiv","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-25T20:57:34Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-14","last_verified_at":"2026-10-18T23:13:50Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":23,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":23},"description":"We’re hiring a Founding ML Research Engineer to work work through the full stack across data, pre-training, post-training & evals for training Generalist Audio Models. You’ll work through the entire stack with small team, tons of compute, high autonomy, and see your research ideas making it to production within a week(s).\nWhat you’ll do\nResearch better multi-modal architectures & codecs that are efficient across both spoken speech & general audio.\nPost-train audio models to have LLM like instruction following & in-context learning but over both text and audio.\nBuild large-scale speech model pre-training and post-training (SFT/RLHF-style, distillation, preference optimization, etc.).\nBuild scalable data + compute pipelines: dataset curation, filtering, mixing, tokenization/feature pipelines, evaluation harnesses.\nLook at lots of data & hear lots of audio.\nWhat we’re looking for\nIndustry/Academia experience pre-training / post-training large neural networks; speech/audio is a plus but not required, language/vision experience is also relevant.\nStrong ML systems and engineering depth (distributed training, performance, reliability).\nComfort operating in ambiguity: you can spec, build, debug, and ship.\nA hunger to always ask - what would the next frontier look like?\nTo apply\nShare arxiv links to papers that: you co-authored, you enjoyed reading, you found surprising.","description_format":"text","description_chars":1384,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":3,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Speech & Audio AI","Generative Audio & Music"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-25T20:57:34Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":55,"band":"ok","label":"Likely open","p_open":1,"p_active":0.727,"p_room":0.75,"age_days":21,"expected_fill_days":30,"reasons":["conf:0","win:late"],"computed_at":"2026-10-17T05:46:00Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":250000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/kalpa-labs-founding-ml-research-engineer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/kalpa-labs-founding-ml-research-engineer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-19T01:46:39Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":1050,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-20T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":3779632},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=3779632"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fkalpa-labs-founding-ml-research-engineer"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fkalpa-labs-founding-ml-research-engineer"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fkalpa-labs-founding-ml-research-engineer"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/kalpa-labs-founding-ml-research-engineer\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fkalpa-labs-founding-ml-research-engineer"}]}