Machine Learning Research Intern, Audio

bland· Engineering
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📍 San FranciscoFullTime

About this role

The Role: Machine Learning Research Intern, Audio

As a Research Intern at Bland, you will own a focused research project across our voice stack: speech-to-text, large language models, neural audio codecs, or text-to-speech. You will work alongside our research team on the same problems they are working on, not on a side track built to keep interns busy.

We scope internships around a single meaningful question that can be answered in the time you have. The goal is a result worth shipping, publishing, or both. Interns here regularly see their work reach production systems handling millions of calls.

What You Will Do

Own a research question end to end

  • Take one well-scoped problem from literature review through implementation, experimentation, and results.

  • Design ablations that isolate what actually caused an improvement.

  • Present your findings to the research team and defend the methodology.

Work on real systems

  • Train and evaluate models on large-scale, real-world telephony audio, including the accents, noise, and artifacts that make production speech hard.

  • Use our distributed GPU infrastructure rather than toy-scale setups.

  • Where the result warrants it, work with engineers to move it toward production.

Choose your depth
Depending on your background and interests, your project may focus on:

  • Expressive and controllable text-to-speech, including prosody and emotion modeling

  • Neural audio codecs and discrete or continuous speech representations

  • ASR robustness for telephony, accents, and code switching

  • Real-time and streaming inference under latency constraints

  • Full-duplex conversation and turn-taking dynamics

What Makes You a Great Fit

Research foundations

  • Currently pursuing a MS or PhD in ML, CS, EE, or a related field, or equivalent research experience.

  • Comfortable reading a paper and reimplementing it without hand-holding.

  • Experience with self-supervised, generative, or multimodal modeling.

Audio or speech grounding

  • Hands-on work with speech or audio models, whether TTS, ASR, codecs, or audio representation learning.

  • Strong intuition for audio quality and what makes synthetic speech sound wrong.

  • Prior publications or open source contributions in speech or language AI are a strong signal, though not required.

Engineering ability

  • Fluent in PyTorch and comfortable in a real codebase.

  • Able to run your own experiments on GPU clusters without waiting to be unblocked.

How You Show Up

  • You identify the single experiment that validates an idea in days, not months.

  • You measure everything and let data drive decisions.

  • You are honest about negative results, because they are how we narrow the search.

  • You are obsessed with making voice agents sound truly human.

  • You use AI tools aggressively to amplify your own impact.

Benefits

  • Competitive intern compensation

  • Mentorship from researchers working on frontier voice AI

  • Every tool you need to succeed

  • Beautiful office in Levi's Plaza, SF with rooftop views

  • A real shot at a return offer

 

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the salary disclosed for the Machine Learning Research Intern, Audio position at bland?
The salary for this Machine Learning Research Intern, Audio role at bland is not publicly listed. Click "Apply Now" to learn more about the compensation package on their official careers page.
Where is the Machine Learning Research Intern, Audio position at bland located?
This Machine Learning Research Intern, Audio role at bland is based in San Francisco. The position is listed as on-site or hybrid. Check the full job description or apply directly to confirm the work arrangement.
Is the Machine Learning Research Intern, Audio role at bland full-time or part-time?
This is listed as a FullTime position. It is posted as a Machine Learning Research Intern, Audio role in the Engineering department at bland.
Which team or department does the Machine Learning Research Intern, Audio at bland belong to?
This Machine Learning Research Intern, Audio position is part of the Engineering department at bland. See the full job description for more information about the team structure and responsibilities.
How do I apply for the Machine Learning Research Intern, Audio position at bland?
Click the "Apply Now" button on this page. You will be redirected to bland's official application portal hosted on ashby where you can submit your application directly.
When was the Machine Learning Research Intern, Audio job at bland posted?
This Machine Learning Research Intern, Audio position at bland was posted on Aug 27, 2026. Apply as soon as possible — early applications are often reviewed first.
Machine Learning Research Intern, Audio
bland
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