5 months ago
Base Salary
$180k - $270k/yr
Responsibilities
- Design novel sequence-modeling architectures and train large-scale speech and audio foundation models.
- Develop systems that understand and generate speech for Plaud’s AI companion.
- Debug distributed training clusters and optimize GPU memory utilization and performance bottlenecks.
- Work across raw acoustic representations, fundamental signal processing, foundation-model training, and edge-device optimization.
- Optimize end-to-end inference and real-time cloud streaming performance.
- Take ownership of ambiguous research and engineering problems and deliver them into production.
- Contribute as an early foundational member of Plaud’s core SpeechLLM lab.
Requirements
- Proven experience building and training large-scale audio or speech models from the ground up, including SpeechLLMs, ASR, TTS, or generative audio architectures.
- Strong ability to work across sequence-modeling research, distributed training, signal processing, foundation-model development, and edge-device optimization.
- Deep expertise in PyTorch or JAX, including large-scale distributed training, GPU memory optimization, and performance troubleshooting.
- Experience taking ownership of ambiguous problems and driving solutions into production in a fast-paced startup environment.
- Preferred experience with text LLM pretraining, instruction tuning, or RLHF.
- Preferred experience designing and training neural audio codecs, diffusion models, flow-matching systems, or autoregressive speech-generation architectures.
- Preferred experience applying RL techniques such as RLHF or GRPO to foundation-model alignment and steerability.
- Preferred experience optimizing inference with high-throughput serving frameworks such as vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, or SGLang.
- Preferred experience managing large GPU clusters with distributed training frameworks such as FSDP or DeepSpeed and orchestration tools such as Kubernetes.
Benefits
- $180K-$270K base salary plus performance bonus and equity
- Healthcare, dental, and vision coverage for employees and dependents with employer subsidy
- 401(k) plan with company matching for full-time employees
- Unlimited PTO and 13 paid holidays
- 12 weeks of paid new-parent leave regardless of gender
- Hybrid work arrangement with at least three in-office days per week
- Choice of high-end laptops or workstations, annual offsites, and a fully stocked office
Tech Stack
Categories
AI ResearchML Engineering
About Plaud
Plaud builds AI-powered hardware devices and companion apps that capture, transcribe, and summarize meetings and other conversations for professionals. The company sells its consumer electronics and meeting software directly, with subscription services layered on its devices and cloud platform. Founded in 2021 and headquartered in San Francisco, Plaud is privately held and lists SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR, and ISO 27001/27701 compliance.