---
title: 'Machine Learning Researcher, Multimodal LLMs at Bland'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/machine-learning-researcher-multimodal-llms-bland-san-francisco-wepqxv9kf2tm'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-17'
---

# Machine Learning Researcher, Multimodal LLMs at Bland

- **Company:** Bland
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $160k–$260k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Posted:** 2026-04-21
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-17
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/bland/681dfcda-f016-4bda-826e-7e813fae0083

## Job description

Machine Learning Researcher, Multimodal LLMs Location: San Francisco, CA or Remote

## About Bland

At [Bland.com](http://Bland.com), our mission is to empower enterprises to build AI phone agents at scale. Voice is quickly becoming the primary interface between businesses and their customers, and we are building the models and infrastructure that make those interactions feel natural, reliable, and genuinely human. We’ve raised $100M from leading investors including Emergence Capital, Scale Venture Partners, Y Combinator, and founders of Twilio, Affirm, and ElevenLabs.

## The Role

We are looking for someone to contribute to the development of our next-generation multimodal LLM stack, combining speech, text, tools, and real-time reasoning into a single unified system. You’ll be responsible for building industry-leading conversational AI models that power Bland's agent, and taking them all the way from idea to production. At Bland, we're not just thinking about text modeling. You will define how our agents listen, think, and act in real time, integrating streaming audio, tool execution, and dynamic context into a single coherent system. You will take ideas from research through production systems serving millions of calls per day.

What Makes You a Great Fit

Strong LLM / Multimodal Background

- Experience with LLMs, multimodal models, or speech-language systems
- Deep understanding of prompting, fine-tuning, and alignment techniques
- Familiarity with neural audio codecs and modern multimodal LLM techniques

Fast Experimental Loop

- You can go from idea → dataset → experiment → conclusion in days
- You know how to design experiments that actually answer the question

Product Intuition

- Strong sense for what makes an interaction feel natural vs robotic
- Ability to translate abstract modeling ideas into user-facing improvements

Builder Mentality

- You take ownership from research through deployment
- You thrive in ambiguous, fast-moving environments
- You care about impact, not just elegance

## How You Show Up

- You think in systems, not just models
- You obsess over latency, correctness, and real-world behavior
- You are comfortable discarding ideas quickly when data disagrees
- You push toward simple abstractions for complex problems

Bonus Points

- Experience with real-time voice systems or conversational AI
- Background in tool-using agents or agent frameworks
- Experience with multimodal datasets (audio + text + actions)
- Contributions to LLM or speech-related research or open source

## Compensation & Benefits

- Competitive salary: $160,000 – $260,000
- Meaningful equity
- Full healthcare, dental, vision
- Office in Levi's Plaza, SF
- High autonomy, high impact

Additional Information Bland is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to proving equal employment opportunities to all qualified applicants and employees and do not discriminate based on any legally protected characteristic.

Bland participates in the E-Verify employment verification program. All new hires are required to complete the Form I-9, and employment will be verified though E-Verify as part of the onboarding process.

## About Bland

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Bland provides an enterprise voice AI platform for building, deploying, and monitoring AI phone agents that hold natural conversations at scale.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series C, over $100M raised)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA
- **Founded**: 2023
- **Founders**: Isaiah Granet and a second co-founder (Y Combinator Summer 2023 batch)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: AI voice agents / enterprise AI infrastructure
- **Target customers**: Large enterprises, regulated industries (healthcare, finance, insurance, etc.) – B2B
- **Mission**: To automate phone calls that previously required a human, with security and trust built from the ground up.

## Products & Services
- **Bland Voice AI Platform (SaaS / On‑premises)**: A full‑stack platform combining custom speech‑to‑text, large language model (LLM), text‑to‑speech, and telephony. Supports inbound and outbound calls across voice, SMS, iMessage, and web chat. Unified memory across channels and real‑time observability.
- **Conversational Pathways**: A proprietary programming language that enables users to create branching, deterministic call flows to reduce hallucinations.
- **Forward Deployed Engineering**: Professional services that build the first production agent end‑to‑end in 2–6 weeks, integrating with the customer’s CRM, telephony, and scheduling tools.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed (latest round: Series C)
- **Key Metric (Funding)**: Over $100M total raised (Series C announced in 2025)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Y Combinator (S23), Team Ignite Ventures, Max Levchin (PayPal co‑founder), Jeff Lawson (Twilio co‑founder)
- **Growth Signals**: 522M+ calls resolved to date, 47M+ calls per month, ~100 employees, $2M ARR achieved within four months of the initial pivot. Certifications include SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, PCI DSS v4.0, and GDPR – enabling adoption in highly regulated verticals.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Full‑stack ownership**: Bland built its own voice models, LLM, text‑to‑speech, and speech‑to‑text – not a wrapper around third‑party APIs. This provides lower latency (~400ms) and full control over model behavior.
- **Compliance‑first design**: SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI DSS, and GDPR out of the box. Self‑hosted and on‑premises deployments available for sensitive workloads.
- **Proprietary orchestration**: The Conversational Pathways language allows deterministic, auditable call flows that reduce hallucination risk.
- **Rapid deployment**: Typical go‑live in 30 days with dedicated Forward Deployed Engineer support.

## Strategic Focus
- **Regulated industries**: Deepening traction in healthcare, financial services, and insurance where compliance and data residency are critical.
- **Global expansion**: Multi‐language support (40+ languages, real‑time translation in 23) and data residency options in US, EU, and APAC.
- **Channel expansion**: Unifying agent memory across voice and messaging to offer a single omnichannel AI assistant.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: “We hire for obsession, not pedigree.” Emphasis on work ethic, accountability, and direct ownership. Flat structure with minimal approval chains (“No committees. No approval chains. Ship the right thing, measure the result, iterate.”)
- **Engineering focus**: The company built its own models and infrastructure – ideal for engineers who want to work on frontier AI problems rather than stitching together APIs.
- **Location & flexibility**: Based in San Francisco with remote (US) options for some roles. The office environment is startup‑intense; the co‑founder famously slept on a closet floor during the early pivot.
- **Notable perks**: Not explicitly listed, but the company highlights a “build it yourself” ethos, early‑stage equity, and direct impact on a product that processes tens of millions of calls per month.

## Sources
1. [bland.com](https://www.bland.com/)
2. [bland.ai](https://www.bland.ai/about)
3. [ycombinator.com](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/bland-ai)
4. [jobs.ashbyhq.com](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/bland)

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