Intern - Speech Processing / ASR for Low-Resource Languages

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 internshipwill support research and development efforts focused on audio enhancement, speech activity detection, and automatic speech recognition (ASR) for low-resource languages. The work will involve real-world audio collected in naturalistic environments, including recordingswithvariable quality, background noise, overlapping speakers, and inconsistent microphone placement.

The intern willassistwith developing methods and prototype pipelines to ingest, clean, segment, and analyze noisy audio toidentifyusable speech segments and candidate data for downstream ASR training and model bootstrapping. Areas of work may include audio enhancement, speech activity detection, speakerdiarization, speaker identification, ASR, and 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.

Primary Responsibilities

• Support Leidos engineers and researchers in defining tasks, workflows, and integration requirements.

• Assistwith designing and implementing a prototype pipeline to transform noisy audio into data usable by downstream speech models.

• Help preprocess, enhance, segment, and analyze noisy audio for low-resource language applications.

• Run experiments, evaluate results, and document findings.

• Prepare technical content and communicate progress, challenges, and next steps in team meetings, design reviews, and technical exchanges.

• Contribute to testing, prototyping, and iterative improvement of speech and audio processing workflows.

Basic Qualifications

• Currentadvanced 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,acousticphoneticsor 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. Citizenshiprequired.

Preferred Qualifications

• Coursework, project work, or research experience in one or more of the following: audio enhancement, speech activity detection, speakerdiarization, speaker identification, ASR, or low-resource language technologies.

• Familiarity with speech, audio, or machine learning tools and frameworks such asPyTorch, TensorFlow,torchaudio, Kaldi,ESPnet,SpeechBrain, Hugging Face,orsimilar.

• 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.

If you're looking for comfort, keep scrolling. At Leidos, we outthink, outbuild, and outpace the status quo - because the mission demands it. We're not hiring followers. We're recruiting the ones who disrupt, provoke, and refuse to fail. Step 10 is ancient history. We're already at step 30 - and moving faster than anyone else dares.

For U.S. Positions: While subject to change based on business needs, Leidos reasonably anticipates that this job requisition will remain open for at least 3 days with an anticipated close date of no earlier than 3 days after the original posting date as listed above.

The Leidos pay range for this job level is a general guideline onlyand not a guarantee of compensation or salary. Additional factors considered in extending an offer include (but are not limited to) responsibilities of the job, education, experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities, as well as internal equity, alignment with market data, applicable bargaining agreement (if any), or other law.

About Leidos

Leidos is an industry and technology leader serving government and commercial customers with smarter, more efficient digital and mission innovations. Headquartered in Reston, Virginia, with 47,000 global employees, Leidos reported annual revenues of approximately $16.7 billion for the fiscal year ended January 3, 2025. For more information, visit www.Leidos.com.

Pay and Benefits

Pay and benefits are fundamental to any career decision. That's why we craft compensation packages that reflect the importance of the work we do for our customers. Employment benefits include competitive compensation, Health and Wellness programs, Income Protection, Paid Leave and Retirement. More details are available at www.leidos.com/careers/pay-benefits.

Securing Your Data

Beware of fake employment opportunities using Leidos' name. Leidos will never ask you to provide payment-related information during any part of the employment application process (i.e., ask you for money), nor will Leidos ever advance money as part of the hiring process (i.e., send you a check or money order before doing any work). Further, Leidos will only communicate with you through emails that are generated by the Leidos.com automated system - never from free commercial services (e.g., Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail) or via WhatsApp, Telegram, etc. If you received an email purporting to be from Leidos that asks for payment-related information or any other personal information (e.g., about you or your previous employer), and you are concerned about its legitimacy, please make us aware immediately by emailing us at LeidosCareersFraud@leidos.com.

If you believe you are the victim of a scam, contact your local law enforcement and report the incident to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.

Commitment to Non-Discrimination

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to sex, race, ethnicity, age, national origin, citizenship, religion, physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, pregnancy, family structure, marital status, ancestry, domestic partner status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, veteran or military status, or any other basis prohibited by law. Leidos will also consider for employment qualified applicants with criminal histories consistent with relevant laws.

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