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Music AI Researcher/Engineer

  • San Francisco, CA
  • $175,000–$225,000 + Equity
  • Full-time
  • Posted May 20, 2026

About Play Anything

Our first product, Songscription, is the AI-powered "Shazam for sheet music" that turns any audio into sheet music, MIDI, tabs, or an interactive piano roll in minutes. Hundreds of thousands of musicians have used it to transcribe songs that had never been written down before. Our second product, Anything Piano (in beta), lets anyone upload a song and learn it through an interactive piano roll with real-time feedback.

We've raised a $5M seed led by Reach Capital and been covered in TechCrunch, Billboard, and MusicRadar. The team is small, the pace is fast, and we're just getting started.

Role description

Play Anything is hiring a Founding Music AI Researcher/Engineer to help push the frontier of AI for music creation and education. We are building models that can listen, understand, and ultimately help humans learn music — automating transcription, arrangement, leveling, and performance feedback. You'll work closely with our Head of AI and data, design, and product teams to turn cutting-edge research into production-ready systems that power the next generation of music learning.

This role is ideal for a researcher who wants to see their ideas reach real musicians. You'll prototype new architectures, experiment with large-scale datasets, and ship production models that enable musicians to play, learn, and create in entirely new ways.

Key responsibilities

  • Research, design, and implement machine learning models for audio and symbolic music understanding and information retrieval
  • Collaborate with design and engineering to integrate models into user-facing products
  • Work with our data team to curate, preprocess, and augment large-scale music datasets
  • Conduct model evaluation, ablation studies, and optimization for real-world latency and reliability
  • Translate recent research advances into applied systems that directly impact creators and learners
  • Play a key role in shaping the direction of our AI roadmap, from early research to large-scale deployment

About you

  • Strong background in machine learning or signal processing, with demonstrated research experience (publications, open-source projects, or significant independent work)
  • Experience building and training large-scale models (audio, sequence, or generative domains preferred)
  • You care about getting models into production and have strong coding and experimentation skills with a practical mindset
  • Comfortable collaborating across disciplines, from engineers to designers and musicians
  • Excited about the intersection of AI and music; performance or composition experience is a plus

Benefits

  • Medical, Vision, Dental, and Life Insurance
  • PTO
  • Team events
  • $175K–$225K + Equity

How to apply

If you're interested, email your LinkedIn and resume to jobs@songscription.ai.When you apply, mention something about pirates or treasure in your email so we know you actually read the listing. We love thoroughness.

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity. Don't meet every requirement? Apply anyway. We'd still love to hear from you.

If Play Anything isn't right for you but you know someone who might be, send them our way. We're offering a referral bonus to anyone who refers a successful hire.