---
title: 'Research Engineer at Phonic'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/research-engineer-phonic-san-francisco-pjsjeqfq1sk1'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-10'
---

# Research Engineer at Phonic

- **Company:** Phonic
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-03-04
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-10
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/phonic/be801101-807a-4d11-8fe4-c8c269bb9701

## Job description

## About Phonic

Phonic is a product and research lab focused on powering the most realistic, human-like voice AI conversations. We've re-thought the entire stack in pursuit of this goal, from models to product, to create voice agents that feel like they truly understand you, respond emotionally and perform agentic tasks with frontier intelligence. Our team includes top-tier AI researchers, international olympiad medalists, and former founders. Our customers include companies that are building voice-native AI products in industries such as customer support, healthcare, and logistics. We have raised over $30M from tier 1 VCs.

## About the Team

Phonic has a very talent-dense and close-knit team. We collaborate with high trust and are constantly trying to improve how we work to deliver world-class research and product. Everyone takes ownership in what they do and they aren’t afraid to dive in headfirst into new problems. Our team includes top-tier AI researchers, international olympiad medalists, and former founders and we’re fully in-person in our SF office.

## About The Role

As a Research Engineer at Phonic, you'll sit at the intersection of cutting-edge ML research and production engineering, working directly on the core systems that make Phonic's voice AI feel genuinely human. You'll design, train, and iterate on models across the voice stack (speech, audio, language, and beyond), while also building the infrastructure and tooling needed to move fast from research idea to deployed product. This is a role for someone who thrives in ambiguity, moves with urgency, and takes full ownership of problems. You'll work closely with researchers and product engineers in a high trust, in-person environment in our SF office to push the frontier of what voice AI can do.

## What You’ll Do

- Design, implement, and iterate on models across the voice stack from audio and speech to language and beyond
- Build the training pipelines, evaluation frameworks, and tooling that let us experiment and iterate quickly
- Translate research results into production-grade systems alongside our engineering team
- Form hypotheses, chase down interesting results, and take ownership over the problems you work on

## What You’ll Bring

- Hands-on experience in ML research or research engineering, industry or PhD-level academia
- Proficiency in Python and PyTorch (or JAX), and the ability to implement models cleanly from papers
- Experience running ML experiments end-to-end: data processing, training, evaluation, and iteration
- Comfort in fast-moving, ambiguous environments - defining the problem is part of the job
- The ability to clearly explain what you tried, what worked, and why

## Nice To Have

- Research experience in speech, audio, or language modeling (ASR, TTS, LLMs, codec models)
- Familiarity with diffusion, flow matching, or autoregressive generative models
- Experience with distributed training, quantization, or inference optimization
- Competitive programming or olympiad background

## Benefits

- 💸 Top-tier compensation: in order to get the best talent, we provide salary and equity that recognize your skillset
- 🥗 Meals: free breakfast, lunch, and dinner provided in the office
- 🩺 Healthcare: Comprehensive health, dental, and vision
- 🤝 We have regular off-sites and team celebrations
- 👵 401(k) – Let us help you plan for the future. We’ve got you covered.

## About Phonic

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Phonic builds a speech-to-speech voice agent platform for enterprises, powered by proprietary audio foundation models to deliver natural, reliable conversations.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Seed stage)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA
- **Founded**: 2024
- **Founders**: Moin Nadeem, Nikhil Murthy

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: Voice AI, Enterprise Software, Artificial Intelligence
- **Target customers**: Enterprises deploying voice agents for customer support, operations, and high-trust interactions (B2B)
- **Mission or purpose statement**: “To make talking to voice AIs as simple and reliable as talking to humans.”

## Products & Services
- **[Phonic Platform]**: An end-to-end speech-to-speech platform for building, evaluating, and deploying voice agents. Features include real-time intelligence, observability, searchable interaction records, and containerized deployment within the customer’s environment. Leverages proprietary audio foundation models for low-latency (under 300ms) conversational voices.
- **[Maven Voice]**: An enterprise-grade AI voice agent built on Phonic’s platform, announced in August 2025 for chaotic, noisy, and unpredictable real-world situations.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed (private company)
- **Key Metric**: Total funding raised: $4M (Seed round, April 2025)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**:
  - Lead investor: Lux Capital
  - Angel investors include: Clement Delangue (Hugging Face CEO), Erik Bernhardsson (Modal), Michele Catasta, Douwe Kiela, Amjad Masad, Qasar Younis
- **Growth Signals**:
  - Seed round of $4M closed in April 2025 with strong investor backing from AI infrastructure leaders.
  - Employee count grew from founding team to ~18 as of April 2026 (estimated 18 from Tracxn; LinkedIn reported 6 in early 2026 before recent hires).
  - Launched Maven Voice in partnership with Maven AGI in August 2025, demonstrating enterprise traction.
  - Active hiring (engineering, research) indicates scaling phase.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Proprietary audio foundation models** that enable speech-to-speech within 300ms, achieving a natural conversational flow that rivals human interaction.
- **Full observability and evaluation stack** — built right into the platform so enterprises can monitor, debug, and improve agent conversations over time.
- **Secure, containerized deployment** — runs completely in the customer’s environment, addressing enterprise security and compliance requirements.
- **Real-time insights and failure analysis** across millions of agents, providing a system of record for voice interactions.

## Strategic Focus
- Continue building the most reliable speech-to-speech platform for enterprise-grade voice agents.
- Expand use cases beyond customer support into high-trust verticals such as healthcare, finance, and insurance.
- Grow the engineering and research team, particularly researchers experienced in audio modeling and production engineers.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: In-person, collaborative team in San Francisco (onsite workspace). The company emphasizes doing meaningful work in a fun environment.
- **Team**: Small, high-caliber team of researchers and engineers from top backgrounds (MIT, Jane Street, Robinhood, Hugging Face). Flat hierarchy with direct impact.
- **Mission**: Opportunity to define how humans interact with voice AI at scale, tackling reliability and naturalness challenges.
- **Perks**: Not publicly detailed, but typical early-stage startup benefits include equity, flexible PTO, and the chance to shape product and culture.
- **Growth**: Rapidly growing after a well‑funded seed round; new hires can expect high ownership and accelerated career development.

## Sources
1. [phonic.co](https://phonic.co/)
2. [phonic.co/company](https://phonic.co/company)
3. [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/phonic)
4. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/phonic-co)
5. [tracxn.com](https://tracxn.com/d/companies/phonic/__4TPVIPNDFpbV6xRNF8_OeUI3ZQMO-qYLkT5bm53BIx0)

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