Internship - Applied Research Scientist
About The Position
Smule is seeking a Research Scientist for its Applied Research team who thrives at the intersection of cutting-edge ML research and real-world product impact. The intern will take ideas from the research frontier, or originate their own, and develop them into practical solutions that improve Smule's products, pipelines, and user experience for a community of millions. The ideal candidate combines research depth with strong engineering instincts, a bias toward measurable outcomes, and genuine curiosity about how people make music. Smule strongly encourages candidates with non-traditional ML backgrounds to apply, including those from audio engineering, music production, signal processing, data science, or other related fields.
Requirements
- Degree (B.S., M.S., or Ph.D.) in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical discipline, or currently pursuing one.
- Demonstrated ability to take research ideas from paper to production, with experience shipping ML-powered features or systems.
- Strong skills in experiment design, statistical analysis, and iterative model development.
- Proficiency in Python, PyTorch or TensorFlow, and standard ML infrastructure (data pipelines, model serving, monitoring).
- Effective communicator who can translate between research concepts and product requirements.
- Track record of identifying high-impact problems and delivering solutions with measurable outcomes.
Nice To Haves
- Experience with audio, speech, music, or multimedia ML applications.
- Familiarity with on-device or edge deployment constraints (model compression, quantization, latency optimization).
- Published work at conferences or journals, such as KDD, RecSys, EMNLP, Interspeech, ISMIR, or similar.
Responsibilities
- Develop and adapt state-of-the-art ML techniques to solve concrete product challenges in areas such as audio processing, content understanding, recommendation, and generative music, delivering measurable improvements in quality, latency, or user experience.
- Design and run rigorous offline and online experiments (A/B tests, ablation studies) to validate model improvements before production deployment.
- Collaborate closely with product managers, designers, and engineers to translate user needs into well-scoped research problems.
- Build prototype models and proof-of-concept systems that demonstrate feasibility and inform production architecture decisions.
- Publish applied research findings at relevant venues and contribute to internal knowledge-sharing through tech talks and documentation.
- Monitor deployed models for drift, fairness, and performance, implementing continuous improvement loops.
Benefits
- Equal Opportunity Employer
- Commitment to creating an inclusive environment
- Reasonable accommodation during the application or interview process
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What This Job Offers
Career Level
Intern
Education Level
High school or GED
