Member of Technical Staff - Post Training, Applied (Audio)

About the role

Liquid AI builds general-purpose AI systems that run efficiently across various deployment targets, including data center accelerators and on-device hardware. We specialize in real-time, low-latency, and privacy-preserving AI solutions for enterprises in sectors such as consumer electronics, automotive, life sciences, and financial services. Our mission is to scale our technology to meet the needs of these industries.

Opportunity

The LFM2.5-Audio project involves developing an end-to-end multimodal speech and text language model with 1.5 billion parameters. This model handles speech-to-speech conversation, automatic speech recognition (ASR), and text-to-speech (TTS) tasks without needing separate components. It is designed for real-time, on-device deployment and is being tailored for enterprise customers. The core challenge is to teach the model to understand user intents and translate them into structured tool calls, enabling voice-driven function calling.

What We’re Looking For

• Takes ownership: Owns customer post-training projects end-to-end for audio workloads, from requirements through delivery and evaluation.
• Thinks end-to-end: Can reason across audio data pipelines, speech-text alignment, model adaptation, and evaluation as a connected system.
• Is pragmatic: Optimizes for model quality and customer outcomes over publications or theory.
• Thrives under constraints: On-device, low-latency, memory-limited audio systems excite you. Sees constraints as design parameters, not blockers.

The Work

Act as the technical owner for enterprise audio post-training engagements. Translate customer requirements into concrete post-training specifications and workflows for LFM2.5-Audio and future audio models. Design and build function calling capabilities for audio models, training models to map spoken user intents to structured tool calls (API invocations, parameter extraction, confirmation flows). Design and execute data generation pipelines for speech-to-speech and text-to-text training, including synthetic dialogue, function calling examples, and intent-action pairs. Run supervised fine-tuning, preference alignment, and reinforcement learning workflows on audio language models. Design task-specific evaluations for audio function calling (intent recognition accuracy, parameter extraction, end-to-end task completion) and feed learnings back into core post-training pipelines.

Must-have Experience

• Hands-on experience with post-training for language models (SFT, preference alignment, and/or RL).
• Experience with data generation and evaluation pipelines for LLM or audio model training.
• Strong intuition for data quality and evaluation design.
• Familiarity with function calling, tool use, or structured output training for language models.

Desired Experience

• Experience with speech or audio language models (speech-to-speech, ASR, TTS, or multimodal audio-text systems).
• Prior exposure to customer-facing or applied ML delivery environments.
• Experience with alignment or RL techniques beyond basic supervised fine-tuning.
• Familiarity with on-device or low-latency inference constraints.

What Success Looks Like (Year One)

• Independently owns and delivers enterprise audio post-training projects with minimal oversight.
• Built and shipped function calling capabilities that reliably translate spoken user intents into tool calls for production use cases.
• Trusted by customers as the technical owner, demonstrating strong judgment and delivery quality.
• Made durable contributions to Liquid's general-purpose post-training and audio pipelines by feeding applied learnings back into baseline model development.

What We Offer

• Real ML work: Fine-tune audio and speech models, build audio data pipelines, and ship solutions to enterprise customers under real-time on-device constraints.
• Compensation: Competitive base salary with equity in a unicorn-stage company.
• Health: Pays 100% of medical, dental, and vision premiums for employees and dependents.
• Financial: Offers 401(k) matching up to 4% of base pay.
• Time Off: Unlimited PTO plus company-wide Refill Days throughout the year.