Machine Learning Research Intern 2027

The Role

As 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.

What You'll Do

• 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

What You'll Bring

• 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

Nice to Have

• 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

Benefits

• Top-tier compensation: in order to get the best talent, we provide salary and equity that recognize your skillset
• Meals: free breakfast, lunch, and dinner provided in the office
• We have regular off-sites and team celebrations