Machine Learning Intern

Bland is hiring a Machine Learning Research Intern, Audio to work on frontier voice AI research. The intern will own an end-to-end research project involving speech, audio, or language models, conduct experiments on real-world telephony audio using distributed GPU infrastructure, and help move successful results toward production.

What you'll 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
• 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
• 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 they're looking for:

• 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
• 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
• Fluent in PyTorch and comfortable in a real codebase
• Able to run your own experiments on GPU clusters without waiting to be unblocked
• Prior publications or open source contributions in speech or language AI are a strong signal, though not required

Benefits:

• 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