Research Scientist
Phonic, San Francisco
About the job
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.