Research Engineer
Kalpa Labs
San Francisco
Workplace: OnsiteFull timeUSD 150,000 - 220,000 annuallyFunction: Research & Scientific (R&D)Experience: 3+ yearsSkills: ["Comfort operating in ambiguity","Ability to spec/build/debug/ship","Curiosity","Hunger to ask questions"]Build and improve generalist audio models end-to-end across data, pre-training, post-training, and evaluation. Research multimodal architectures and efficient codecs, then post-train models for LLM-like instruction following and in-context learning over text and audio. Develop scalable pre-training/post-training workflows (e.g., SFT/RLHF-style, distillation, preference optimization) plus data and compute pipelines with evaluation harnesses. Work with a small team and high compute to ship research to production quickly.

