Speech Processing / ASR for Low-Resource Languages Intern
Leidos
Speech Processing / ASR for Low-Resource Languages Intern
Leidos
Builds technology for defense and civil agencies
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 only and 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.
Leidos develops technology and runs services for defense, intelligence and civilian agencies, as well as healthcare and commercial customers. It combines software and engineering work with systems integration, building secure networks and equipment used in demanding operations. Its portfolio includes medical services, energy infrastructure design and technology that supports military missions, linking specialist businesses under one parent. Customers pay through contracts for delivered systems and services, with payment tied to labor, costs or agreed project milestones. Leidos traces its roots to a company founded in 1969 and is headquartered in Reston, Virginia.
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