Senior Machine Learning Research Engineer

Los Angeles +2 · On-site$250k – $320k + EquityNo Visa Sponsorship

About this role

We are looking for a Machine Learning Research Engineer with 5+ years of experience (PhD + 1 year industry, or 5 years industry with publications) to own the full lifecycle of ML research and development at the frontier of audio AI. You'll join a fast-growing team backed by NVIDIA and top-tier investors, building cutting-edge speech and audio models that power the data layer for the world's leading AI labs. This is a role for someone who thrives in a research-driven environment, has published at top conferences, and is excited to take end-to-end ownership of novel ML directions — from design and training to deployment and fine-tuning.

What will you be doing?

Owning full research directions end-to-end — designing, training, deploying, and fine-tuning ML models for speech and audio applications

Publishing and advancing the state of the art in speech, audio, and multimodal ML (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR caliber work)

Building production-grade inference systems and resilient pipelines that process terabytes of audio data daily

Collaborating cross-functionally with operations and engineering teams to gather training/evaluation datasets and improve model quality

Setting ML roadmaps and mentoring other engineers as the team scales

Company at a glance

David AI is an audio data research company founded in 2024 by former Scale AI engineers that provides critical infrastructure for AI development, serving most FAANG companies and leading AI labs with over $50M in Series B funding.

Founded2024
Team Size11-50
WorkspaceOn-site
StageSeries B
IndustryAI/ML
Locations
Los Angeles, CA, United States ·New York City, NY, United States ·San Francisco, CA, USA
Investors
Alt Capital ·Amplify Partners ·First Round Capital ·Meritech Capital Partners ·NVIDIA ·Y Combinator
LinkedInLinkedIn

What happens next

Skip the application pile. I get you in front of the people who decide.

Confirm the fit

A few questions to make sure this role is the right shape for you. Two minutes.

I pitch you to the company

I write the intro, send it to the founder, and handle the back-and-forth.

A meeting lands on your calendar

When the company wants to meet, I get the call on your calendar. You just show up.

Culture & values

Team is sharp, humble, ambitious, and tight-knit

Lean team that met while working at Scale AI

Obsess over execution

Bring an R&D approach to work with same rigor as AI labs

Looking for the best research, engineering, product, and operations minds

Know someone who'd be great for this?