Research Scientist

About Phonic

Phonic is the speech-to-speech model company. Our mission is to make speaking with agents delightful, and we believe that requires models that hear and answer in native audio. To make that possible in production, we work on every layer of the stack: data, pre-training, post-training, kernels, and infrastructure. We’ve raised over $30M from top-tier investors, including First Round, Lux Capital, and Felicis. Our models power voice agents on six continents for companies like Ashby, Maven AGI, and a Fortune 50 IT infrastructure company, handling everything from customer support and patient intake to recruiting interviews and dispatch.

About the Team

We’re a small team of researchers and engineers from MIT, Stanford, CMU, MosaicML, Citadel, and Genesis Therapeutics, including former founders, an IMO medalist, and an International Linguistics Olympiad medalist. We work in person in San Francisco five days a week. Everyone here is unusually obsessed with our customers: we’ll happily spend hours perfecting the way our model reasons while it talks, or the way it makes a caller feel heard, going as deep into the stack as it takes.

The Role

As a Research Scientist at Phonic, you'll drive original research that pushes the boundary of what's possible in voice AI. You'll own research directions end-to-end - from identifying the right problems to designing experiments, developing novel methods, and seeing results through to production impact. Your work will directly shape the models at the core of Phonic's product. You'll be working alongside a team of world-class researchers and engineers who move fast and hold a high bar. 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 stac: synthesis, modeling, alignment, perception, and take full ownership of driving them forward
• Design and run rigorous experiments, then translate what works into shipped improvements to our models and product
• Work directly with research engineers to move fast from prototype to production
• Help set the scientific direction of the team and raise the bar on how we do research

What You’ll Bring

• A track record of original research - you've found a real problem, developed a novel approach, and seen it through
• Deep expertise in at least one of: speech synthesis, ASR, audio modeling, language modeling, or multimodal learning
• Fluency in the math, probability, optimization, linear algebra, and the ability to reason about model behavior from first principles
• You move fluidly between ideas and implementation; you don't just write papers, you build things
• Clear, precise written and verbal communication

Nice To Have

• Publications at top venues (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, Interspeech, ICASSP, ACL, etc.)
• Experience with generative modeling, diffusion, flow matching, codec-based audio, or autoregressive models
• Familiarity with RLHF or preference optimization
• You are a former founder

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
• 🩺 Healthcare: Comprehensive health, dental, and vision
• 🤝 We have regular off-sites and team celebrations
• 👵 401(k) – Let us help you plan for the future