Research Intern (Fall 2026)

Summary

Phonic is a product and research lab focused on powering realistic, human-like voice AI conversations. As a Research Intern, you'll own research directions end-to-end, from identifying problems to designing experiments and developing methods that lead 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

Skills

• 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
• 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

Qualifications

Must Haves

• 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 Haves

• 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