# Founding ML Research Engineer at Kalpa Labs

- Company: Kalpa Labs (YC F25)
- What the company does: Scaling Generalist Speech models. Backed by Y Combinator.
- Company website: https://kalpalabs.ai/
- Type: Startups (AI role)
- Level: Mid level
- Location: San Francisco, CA, US
- Work setup: On-site
- Pay: $180K to $250K base salary per year (USD)
- Posted: 2026-07-21
- Apply by: 2026-10-08
- Apply: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/kalpa-labs/jobs/aGLio5O-founding-ml-research-engineer
- Page: https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/kalpa-labs-founding-ml-research-engineer/

## About the role

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). Share arxiv links to papers that: you co-authored, you enjoyed reading, you found surprising.

## What they're looking for

- Industry/Academia experience pre-training / post-training large neural networks, speech/audio is a plus but not required, language/vision experience is also relevant
- Strong ML systems and engineering depth (distributed training, performance, reliability)
- Comfort operating in ambiguity: you can spec, build, debug, and ship
- A hunger to always ask - what would the next frontier look like?

Tags: Engineering