{"id":842293,"url":"https://alion.io/job/phonic-machine-learning-research-intern-2027","title":"Machine Learning Research Intern 2027","company":{"id":720928,"name":"Phonic","domain":"phonic.ai","url":"https://alion.io/company/phonic-2","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":75,"open_postings":5,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":1,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-09-24T05:45:00Z"}},"role":"Early Careers","role_family":"Early Careers","seniority":"intern","employment_type":"internship","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":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":58000,"max_usd":98000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":90},"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"JAX","optional":false},{"name":"PyTorch","optional":false},{"name":"Voice Agents","optional":false},{"name":"RLHF","optional":true},{"name":"Speech Recognition","optional":true},{"name":"Text-to-Speech","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-06-03T01:48:32Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-06-03","last_verified_at":"2026-09-24T19:52:44Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":113,"trust":{"level":"stale","repost_count":0,"flags":["stale"],"days_open":113},"description":"About Phonic\nPhonic 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.\nOur team includes top-tier AI researchers, international olympiad medalists, and former founders.\nOur customers include companies that are building voice-native AI products in industries such as customer support, healthcare, and logistics. We have raised over $30M from tier 1 VCs.\nAbout the Team\nPhonic 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.\nThe Role\nAs a Research Intern at Phonic, you'll work directly on the core problems that make Phonic's voice AI feel genuinely human. You'll own a research direction end-to-end - from identifying the right problem to designing experiments, developing novel methods, and seeing results through to production impact. This isn't a role focused on incremental improvements; we're looking for someone with the taste to identify what matters, the rigor to pursue it correctly, and the drive to ship it. You'll be fully in-person in our SF office.\nWhat You'll Do\nIdentify high-leverage research problems across the voice AI stack from audio understanding to audio output, and take full ownership of driving them forward\n\nDesign and run rigorous experiments that analyze architectural trade-offs to understand how design choices influence a model’s scalability, latency, and quality\n\nCurate massive training datasets and execute rigorous experiments to determine exactly how data quality shapes model behavior and performance\n\nWork directly with research scientists and engineers to move fast from prototype to production\n\nBuild the training pipelines, evaluation frameworks, and tooling that let us experiment and iterate quickly\n\nWhat You'll Bring\nA track record of original work: you've found a real problem, developed an approach, and seen it through\n\nProficiency in PyTorch (or JAX), and the ability to implement models cleanly from papers\n\nFluency in the math, probability, optimization, and linear algebra underlying model behavior\n\nYou move fluidly between ideas and implementation; you don't just think about problems, you build things\n\nClear, precise written and verbal communication\n\nNice To Have\nResearch experience in speech, audio, or language modeling (ASR, TTS, LLMs, codec models)\n\nFamiliarity with generative modeling techniques: diffusion, flow matching, or autoregressive models\n\nExperience with RLHF or preference optimization\n\nCompetitive programming or olympiad background\n\nPublications or preprints at venues like NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, Interspeech, ICASSP, or ACL\n\nBenefits\n Top-tier compensation: in order to get the best talent, we provide salary and equity that recognize your skillset\n\n Meals: free breakfast, lunch, and dinner provided in the office\n\nWe have regular off-sites and team celebrations","description_format":"text","description_chars":3383,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Artificial Intelligence","LLM & Generative AI","Speech & Audio AI"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-12T22:26:32Z"}],"liveness":{"score":8,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.234,"p_room":0.36,"age_days":113,"expected_fill_days":60,"reasons":["conf:9","win:tail","crowd:junior"],"computed_at":"2026-09-24T05:45:00Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/phonic-machine-learning-research-intern-2027","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/phonic-machine-learning-research-intern-2027.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-09-24T23:07:39Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","usage":{"tier":"crawler","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":1319,"day_limit":5000,"remaining_today":3681,"minute_limit":60,"resets_at":"2026-09-25T00:00:00Z"}}}