LLM Research Intern (December 2026 to April 2027)

Procogia, Inc.; Vancouver; On-site; CAD 28,000 - 36,000; Full time

Job summary

ProCogia, Inc. in Vancouver is seeking a curious LLM Research Intern for Dec 2026–Apr 2027.

You will join our AI, data science, and engineering teams to explore open‑weight LLMs, fine‑tuning, continued pretraining, and evaluation on enterprise use cases. You will work hands‑on on datasets, model adaptations, evaluation frameworks, and reproducible experiments, gaining experience with RAG, inference optimization, and deployment considerations.

Qualifications

• Strong programming skills in Python.
• Hands-on experience with machine learning or deep learning through research, coursework, internships, projects, or open‑source contributions.
• Solid understanding of transformer architectures, LLMs, and modern NLP concepts.
• Experience or exposure to model training and fine‑tuning using tools such as PyTorch and Hugging Face Transformers.
• Understanding of experimental design, benchmarking, model evaluation, and data quality.
• Working knowledge of model size, GPU memory, context length, training compute, inference performance, and cost trade‑offs.
• Strong analytical and problem‑solving skills with the ability to challenge assumptions and interpret experimental results.
• Ability to read technical research and translate new ideas into practical, testable experiments.
• Strong communication, documentation, curiosity, ownership, professionalism, and ability to learn quickly.

Responsibilities

• Assess domain‑specific datasets and determine adaptation approaches (fine‑tuning, continued pretraining, RAG, or hybrid strategies).
• Establish baseline performance and measure improvements from model adaptations.
• Curate, clean, deduplicate, structure, and quality‑filter datasets for training and evaluation.
• Fine‑tune open‑weight LLMs using LoRA, QLoRA, PEFT, and multi‑adapter approaches.
• Support training and experimentation across single‑GPU and distributed multi‑GPU environments.
• Design rigorous evaluation frameworks covering factuality, reasoning, grounding, robustness, and domain performance.
• Apply public benchmarks and build task‑specific evaluation datasets and metrics.
• Compare models, prompting strategies, retrieval methods, and adaptation techniques through controlled experiments.
• Analyze trade‑offs across model quality, accuracy, latency, memory, GPU utilization, token usage, compute requirements, and cost.
• Improve model reliability by evaluating RAG, grounding, reranking, guardrails, and inference optimization.
• Research emerging models, papers, datasets, benchmarks, and techniques, and communicate findings through reproducible experiments, documentation, demos, and presentations.

Skills

Python

ML/DL experience

Transformer architectures

PyTorch

Hugging Face Transformers

Experimental design

Benchmarking

Data quality

Communication & documentation

Tools

PyTorch

Hugging Face Transformers

LoRA/QLoRA/PEFT

Job description

If you’re looking for a dynamic and diverse place to work, where the environment supports continual learning and offers endless opportunities, then a ProCogia career could be the one for you.

LLM Research Intern (December 2026 to April 2027)

About ProCogia:

ProCogia is a data and AI consulting firm helping organizations turn complex technology challenges into measurable business outcomes. We work across highly regulated and high-stakes industries, including telecommunications, financial services, life sciences, healthcare, and the public sector, where security, governance, reliability, and performance are critical. Our teams bring together expertise across data science, engineering, AI, analytics, and consulting to design and deliver practical, production-ready solutions. We are actively advancing capabilities across generative AI, agentic systems, workflow automation, AI governance, and enterprise AI applications. At ProCogia, you will work alongside experienced practitioners on meaningful technical challenges and contribute directly to both client solutions and the platforms and products we are building internally.

Our Core Values: Trust, Growth, Innovation, Excellence, and Ownership

Work Location: Vancouver (On-site – Full-Time Work from office in Vancouver, five days a week Mon-Fri)

Job Summary

ProCogia is looking for a curious and technically strong LLM Research Intern to join our Vancouver team. This is a hands‑on research and engineering role for someone interested in understanding how large language models can be adapted, evaluated, optimized, and deployed for specialized enterprise use cases. You will work alongside our AI, data science, and engineering teams to experiment with open-weight LLMs, supervised fine‑tuning, continued pretraining, parameter‑efficient adaptation, model evaluation, RAG, and inference optimization.

Key Responsibilities

• Assess domain‑specific datasets and determine the right adaptation approach across fine‑tuning, continued pretraining, RAG, or hybrid strategies.
• Establish baseline performance and measure whether model adaptations produce meaningful, defensible improvements.
• Curate, clean, deduplicate, structure, and quality‑filter datasets for training and evaluation.
• Fine‑tune open‑weight LLMs using techniques such as LoRA, QLoRA, PEFT, and multi‑adapter approaches.
• Support training and experimentation across single‑GPU and distributed multi‑GPU environments.
• Design rigorous evaluation frameworks covering factuality, reasoning, grounding, robustness, domain performance, and failure modes.
• Apply public benchmarks and build task‑specific evaluation datasets and metrics where standard benchmarks are insufficient.
• Compare models, prompting strategies, retrieval methods, and adaptation techniques through controlled experiments.
• Analyze trade‑offs across model quality, accuracy, latency, memory, GPU utilization, token usage, compute requirements, and cost.
• Improve model reliability by evaluating RAG, grounding, reranking, guardrails, hallucination‑reduction techniques, and inference optimization.
• Research emerging models, papers, datasets, benchmarks, and techniques, and communicate findings through reproducible experiments, documentation, demos, and presentations.

What You Bring?

• Strong programming skills in Python.
• Hands‑on experience with machine learning or deep learning through research, coursework, internships, projects, or open‑source contributions.
• Solid understanding of transformer architectures, LLMs, and modern NLP concepts.
• Experience or exposure to model training and fine‑tuning using tools such as PyTorch and Hugging Face Transformers.
• Understanding of experimental design, benchmarking, model evaluation, and data quality.
• Working knowledge of model size, GPU memory, context length, training compute, inference performance, and cost trade‑offs.
• Strong analytical and problem‑solving skills with the ability to challenge assumptions and interpret experimental results.
• Ability to read technical research and translate new ideas into practical, testable experiments.
• Strong communication, documentation, curiosity, ownership, professionalism, and ability to learn quickly.

Compensation- $23/hour

Who can apply?

"This internship is supported by the Government of Canada's Student Work Placement Program (SWPP)”. To be eligible for SWPP funding, applicants must meet all three conditions given below:

• be a Canadian citizen, permanent resident, or person granted refugee protection in Canada;
• be enrolled as a full‑time student at a recognized Canadian post‑secondary institution for the duration of the placement [Dec 2026 to Apr 2027]; and
• be legally entitled to work in Canada. International students are not eligible for SWPP‑funded placements.

Why ProCogia:

At ProCogia, you will work at the intersection of cloud, data, AI, and enterprise technology. You will solve real problems across commercial and regulated environments, work directly with clients, and take meaningful ownership from infrastructure design through production. You will also help shape the platform foundation supporting ProCogia’s growing AI capabilities, giving you exposure to technologies and challenges that extend well beyond traditional DevOps. This is an environment where strong engineers can build, learn, take ownership, and make a visible impact.

ProCogia is proud to be an equal‑opportunity employer. We are committed to creating a diverse and inclusive workspace. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, protected veteran status, disability, age, or other legally protected status.

Be Part of Our Team

We’re a diverse, close‑knit team with a common pursuit of providing top‑class, end‑to‑end data solutions for our clients.

ProCogia has achieved a 149% growth in headcount over the last 12 months. Core to our culture is a commitment to attract team members from all backgrounds, nationalities, religions, races, gender identities, and sexual orientations who feel valued, engaged, and inspired to do their best work.

• In return for your talent and technical expertise, you will be rewarded with a competitive salary, generous benefits along with ample opportunity for personal development.
• 'Growth mindset' is something we seek in all our new hires and has helped drive much of our recent growth across North America.
• As a team member at ProCogia, you will have access to mentoring and coaching schemes to ensure your continual development.
• We assign each employee a generous personal development budget to spend on training, courses, or coaching.
• We’re committed to growing industry data analysis knowledge by training the next cohort of data experts in the community.
• There is no failure at ProCogia, just an opportunity to learn and grow.

Learn and Grow With ProCogia

As a team member at ProCogia, you will have access to mentoring and coaching schemes to ensure your continual development. Our team members are encouraged to progress and become leaders and to support our technical consultants to excel within their disciplines. There is no failure at ProCogia, just an opportunity to learn and grow. We want to see all our team members succeed.

Personal Development

As an employee, you will benefit from life‑long learning and continual personal development. We assign each employee a generous personal development budget to spend on training, courses, or coaching. We’re committed to growing industry data analysis knowledge by training the next cohort of data experts in the community.

We work with industry‑leading clients from many sectors including Life Sciences, Telecom, Retail, and Technology. Our consultants love what they do and are passionate about providing relevant and innovative solutions for all our clients.

Why Work at ProCogia?

Considering a career at ProCogia offers a blend of professional growth, a supportive work environment, and opportunities for meaningful contributions across various industries. Here are six compelling reasons why you might consider ProCogia as a potential employer:

A significant majority of ProCogia employees report it as a great place to work, indicating strong company culture and employee satisfaction compared to typical U.S.-based companies.

Pursuant to 20 CFR 655.734, ProCogia is providing notice to potentially affected workers that H-1B workers are being sought at the worksites listed below. Each U.S. Labor Condition Application is available for public inspection at the following address:

Complaints alleging misrepresentation of material facts in the Labor Condition Application and/or failure to comply with the terms of the Labor Condition Application may be filed with any office of the Wage and Hour Division of the U.S. Department of Labor. LCA notices are posted electronically through ProCogia’s website at https://procogia.com for a period of no less than 10 consecutive business days.