Centific · 4 weeks ago
AI Speech Research Intern
United States
Internship
Remote
Intern
$35/hr - $40/hrCentific AI Research seeks a PhD Research Intern to design and evaluate speech‑first models, with a focus on Spoken Language Models (SLMs) that reason over audio and interact conversationally. You’ll move ideas from prototype to practical demos, working with scientists and engineers to deliver measurable impact.
AnalyticsArtificial Intelligence (AI)DatabaseInformation TechnologyRetail Technology
Responsibilities
End‑to‑end speech dialogue systems (speech‑in/speech‑out) and speech‑aware LLMs
Alignment between speech encoders and text backbones via lightweight adapters
Efficient speech tokenization and temporal compression suitable for long‑form audio
Reliable evaluation across recognition, understanding, and generation tasks—including robustness and safety
Latency‑aware inference for streaming and real‑time user experiences
Prototype a conversational SLM using an SSL speech encoder and a compact adapter on an existing LLM; compare against strong baselines
Create a data recipe that blends conversational speech with instruction‑following corpora; run targeted ablations and report findings
Build an evaluation harness that covers ASR/ST/SLU and speech QA, including streaming metrics (latency, stability, endpointing)
Ship a minimal demo with streaming inference and logging; document setup, metrics, and reliability checks
Author a crisp internal write‑up: goals, design choices, results, and next steps for productionization
Qualification
Required
PhD candidate in CS/EE (or related) with research in speech, audio ML, or multimodal LMs
Fluency in Python and PyTorch, with hands‑on GPU training; familiarity with torchaudio or librosa
Working knowledge of modern sequence models (Transformers or SSMs) and training best practices
Depth in at least one area: (a) discrete speech tokens/temporal compression, (b) modality alignment to LLMs via adapters, or (c) post‑training/instruction tuning for speech tasks
Strong experimentation habits: clean code, ablations, reproducibility, and clear reporting
Preferred
Experience with speech generation (neural codecs/vocoders) or hybrid text+speech decoding
Background in multilingual or code‑switching speech and domain adaptation
Hands‑on work evaluating safety, bias, hallucination, or spoofing risks in speech systems
Distributed training/serving (FSDP/DeepSpeed), and experience with ESPnet, SpeechBrain, or NVIDIA NeMo
Benefits
Comprehensive healthcare, dental, and vision coverage
401k plan
Paid time off (PTO)
And more!
Company
Centific
Zero distance innovation for GenAI creators and industries Expertly engineering platforms and curating multimodal, multilingual data, we empower the ‘Magnificent Seven’ and enterprise clients with safe, scalable AI deployment We a team of over 150 PhDs and data scientists, along with more than 4,000 AI practitioners and engineers.
Founded in 2020
5001-10000 employees
H1B Sponsorship
Centific has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (10)
2024 (22)
2023 (14)
Funding
Current Stage
Late StageTotal Funding
$60MKey Investors
Granite Asia
2025-06-24Series A· $60M
Leadership Team
Vasudevan Sundarababu
Chief Data and AI Officer
Recent News
Venture Capital Firms
2025-06-26
2025-01-08
Company data provided by crunchbase