Research Intern at Phonic in San Francisco, CA

Summary: Phonic is a product and research lab focused on creating realistic voice AI conversations. As a Research Intern, you will work on core problems in voice AI, taking ownership of research directions and driving them from problem identification to production impact. Responsibilities: - Identify high-leverage research problems across the voice AI stack from audio understanding to audio output, and take full ownership of driving them forward - Design and run rigorous experiments that analyze architectural trade-offs to understand how design choices influence a model’s scalability, latency, and quality - Curate massive training datasets and execute rigorous experiments to determine exactly how data quality shapes model behavior and performance - Work directly with research scientists and engineers to move fast from prototype to production - Build the training pipelines, evaluation frameworks, and tooling that let us experiment and iterate quickly Required Qualifications: - A track record of original work: you've found a real problem, developed an approach, and seen it through - Proficiency in PyTorch (or JAX), and the ability to implement models cleanly from papers - Fluency in the math, probability, optimization, and linear algebra underlying model behavior - You move fluidly between ideas and implementation; you don't just think about problems, you build things - Clear, precise written and verbal communication Preferred Qualifications: - Research experience in speech, audio, or language modeling (ASR, TTS, LLMs, codec models) - Familiarity with generative modeling techniques: diffusion, flow matching, or autoregressive models - Experience with RLHF or preference optimization - Competitive programming or olympiad background - Publications or preprints at venues like NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, Interspeech, ICASSP, or ACL Required Skills: PyTorch, Research experience in speech, Fluency in math Important Skills: Generative modeling techniques Nice-to-Have Skills: JAX, RLHF, Competitive programming Benefits: Top-tier compensation: in order to get the best talent, we provide salary and equity that recognize your skillset, Free breakfast, lunch, and dinner provided in the office, We have regular off-sites and team celebrations