Rubrik alumnus Harsh Vardhan Goenka joins Kalpa Labs as founding engineer

Harsh Vardhan Goenka has been named the first founding engineer at Kalpa Labs, a venture currently participating in the Y Combinator F25 cohort. Goenka previously served as an engineer at Rubrik Inc., where he focused on cloud infrastructure and performance optimization.

Kalpa Labs is developing general-purpose audio models. The startup aims to move beyond basic text-to-speech capabilities, working instead on models capable of generating complex audio outputs such as voiced podcasts, singing, and emotive speech based on text prompts.

In his transition from infrastructure engineering to machine learning research, Goenka follows the company’s internal policy of encouraging staff to work outside their primary domain expertise. The firm argues that this approach fosters unique insights into difficult technical problems that specialists might overlook.

As a founding engineer, Goenka participates in high-level product roadmap discussions and hiring alongside the founders, Prashant and Gautam. Kalpa Labs continues to build its team as it works to advance its generative audio technology.