[Hiring] Intern – Speech Processing / ASR for Low-Resource Languages @Leidos

Role Description

The Intel Sector at Leidos is seeking a Technical Intern to support the Cyber & Information Sciences Division starting in Summer 2026. This is an exciting opportunity to contribute to the development and prototyping of innovative technologies that advance the state of the art in language and speech processing.

This internship will support research and development efforts focused on:

• Audio enhancement
• Speech activity detection
• Automatic speech recognition (ASR) for low-resource languages

The work will involve real-world audio collected in naturalistic environments, including:

• Recordings with variable quality
• Background noise
• Overlapping speakers
• Inconsistent microphone placement

The intern will assist with developing methods and prototype pipelines to:

• Ingest, clean, segment, and analyze noisy audio
• Identify usable speech segments
• Prepare candidate data for downstream ASR training and model bootstrapping

Areas of work may include:

• Audio enhancement
• Speech activity detection
• Speaker diarization
• Speaker identification
• ASR
• Data preparation techniques for low-resource language settings

The ideal candidate is curious, adaptable, and collaborative, with foundational experience in Python and an interest in speech, audio, or machine learning. This candidate will work closely with research scientists, data scientists, and engineers in support of an applied R&D project, and should be comfortable learning new tools, communicating progress, and contributing to technical problem-solving as part of a team.

Qualifications

• Current advanced undergraduate (rising junior or rising senior) or graduate student studying Computational Linguistics, Speech and Hearing Sciences, Acoustics, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Data Science, or a related technical field.
• Coursework, academic project experience, lab experience, or other hands-on experience in one or more of the following: speech processing, audio signal processing, machine learning, natural language processing, acoustic phonetics or a related area.
• Experience programming in Python through coursework, research, projects, or internships.
• Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to communicate technical results clearly.
• U.S. Citizenship required.

Requirements

• Coursework, project work, or research experience in one or more of the following: audio enhancement, speech activity detection, speaker diarization, speaker identification, ASR, or low-resource language technologies.
• Familiarity with speech, audio, or machine learning tools and frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, torchaudio, Kaldi, ESPnet, SpeechBrain, Hugging Face, or similar.
• Experience working with noisy, conversational, far-field, or otherwise real-world audio data.
• Familiarity with data preparation, annotation workflows, corpus curation, or model bootstrapping approaches.
• Familiarity with AWS or other cloud-based development environments.
• Publications, class projects, research posters, GitHub projects, or other demonstrable technical work in a relevant area.

Benefits

• Competitive pay range: $48,100.00 - $86,950.00
• Opportunities for professional development and growth
• Collaborative work environment with experienced professionals