Research Intern
Salary not listed • San Francisco, CA • Internship
Posted 7h ago
No salary is listed. Many US states require employers to post a pay range, so ask about pay early.
Job Location
San Francisco, CA
Tech Stack
Remote Work Policy
On-site
Employment Type
Internship
Categories
AI Research Engineer
About the job
Sierra is seeking an Applied Research Intern to join their team focused on improving the performance, speed, and cost-efficiency of AI agents. This internship offers a unique opportunity to work on a research project from conception to potential publication, with the guidance of a mentor. The intern will tackle real-world AI agent challenges, conduct rigorous experiments, and contribute to advancements in agent evaluation, reasoning, and post-training methods. The role is ideal for individuals passionate about making AI agents more reliable and effective, with the potential for their research to impact millions of users.
Responsibilities
- Own a research project from framing the question and running experiments to writing and submitting a paper.
- Advance agent evaluation by extending benchmarks to new domains, modalities, or tasks, or by developing new reliability measures.
- Investigate how AI agents reason, utilize tools, and adhere to policies in multi-turn conversations, identifying failure points.
- Explore and apply post-training methods like supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning to enhance agent behavior, rigorously measuring improvements.
- Utilize large-scale text and audio datasets to identify research questions relevant to customer problems.
- Collaborate with researchers and engineers to translate research findings into production improvements where applicable.
Requirements
- Currently pursuing a PhD in computer science, machine learning, or a related field.
- Demonstrated research track record, evidenced by first-author publications or submissions at top-tier venues (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, EMNLP, Interspeech, ICASSP).
- Strong experimental design skills, including building careful baselines and interpreting results accurately.
- Proficiency in Python and modern ML tooling, such as PyTorch, and LLM inference and training stacks.
- High initiative and a proactive, builder's mindset, with the ability to work across the stack to execute experiments.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills, particularly in presenting research.
Benefits
- Flexible (unlimited) paid time off
- Medical, dental, and vision benefits for you and your family
- Life insurance and disability benefits
- Retirement plan dependent on country of employment
- Parental leave