LLM Agent Research Intern

IMAGE FRAME INVESTMENT (UK) LIMITED; Greater London; On-site; GBP 13,000 - 20,000; Part time

Job summary

Tencent Level Infinite is seeking a research intern to train LLM agents that play in-game characters, maintaining persona, memory, and world rules across multi-turn dialogue. You will work on supervised fine-tuning, post-training methods like DPO and RLVR, and collaborate with game designers to deploy live agents while optimizing latency and cost.

Candidates should be in a Master’s/PhD program (or recently graduated), fluent in English, with Python and PyTorch experience and familiarity with

Qualifications

• Currently enrolled in a Master’s or PhD program in Computer Science, NLP, Machine Learning, or a related field, or recently graduated.
• Available at least three days per week, with supervisor and university approval where required.
• Fluent English (written and spoken) and strong communication skills.
• Hands-on experience with supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of LLMs, and with post-training methods including DPO and RLVR.
• Experience training or evaluating role‑play or character‑dialogue models, including persona consistency, multi-turn dialogue, and staying in character.
• Proficient in Python and PyTorch, and comfortable with the Hugging Face / Transformers training stack.

Responsibilities

• Train LLM agents for in-game characters, ensuring persona consistency and multi-turn coherence.
• Collaborate with game designers and engineers to deploy agents in a live game while managing latency and cost.
• Curate and prepare SFT, preference data, and verification checks (format, language, safety).
• Iterate experiments, evaluate results, and report findings clearly to the team.

Skills

Fluent English

Communication skills

Python

PyTorch

Hugging Face/Transformers

Education

Master’s or PhD in Computer Science/NLP/ML or related field

Tools

Python

PyTorch

Hugging Face/Transformers

Job description

About the Hiring Team Level Infinite is Tencent’s global gaming brand. It is a global game publisher offering a comprehensive network of services for games, development teams, and studios around the world. We are dedicated to delivering engaging and original gaming experiences to a worldwide audience, whenever and wherever they choose to play while building a community that fosters inclusivity, connection, and accessibility. Level Infinite also provides a wide range of services and resources to our network of developers and partner studios around the world to help them unlock the true potential of their games.

What the Role Entails

We are hiring a research intern to train LLM agents that play in-game characters. The agent has to stay in persona across multi-turn dialogue, use memory and game context, and keep relationship, tone, and world rules intact. The work sits on a live role‑play NPC model: supervised fine-tuning today, with preference optimization and verifiable-reward reinforcement learning as the next training stages.

• 1. Train role‑play agents with supervised fine-tuning (SFT), then post‑train them with direct preference optimization (DPO) and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). Iterate on persona consistency, multi‑turn coherence, and instruction following.
• 2. Build and curate SFT, preference, and verifiable‑reward data for character dialogue, covering memory injection, relationship stage, language switching, emotion, and out‑of‑character resistance.
• 3. Design checks that can be verified automatically, such as format, language, persona boundaries, and safety refusals, and use them both as RLVR rewards and as offline regression tests.
• 4. Work with game designers and engineers to bring the agent into a live game, and keep latency, cost, and player experience within production constraints.

Who We Look For

• 1. Currently enrolled in a Master’s or PhD program in Computer Science, NLP, Machine Learning, or a related field, or recently graduated. Available at least three days per week, with supervisor and university approval where required.
• 2. Fluent English (written and spoken) and strong communication skills are required. You will work closely with game designers, engineers, and researchers across regions, and must be able to explain experiment results and trade‑offs clearly.
• 3. Hands‑on experience with supervised fine‑tuning (SFT) of LLMs, and with post‑training methods including DPO and RLVR (or a closely related verifiable‑reward RL method). You should be able to run the loop from data and training config through evaluation and the next iteration.
• 4. Experience training or evaluating role‑play or character‑dialogue models, including persona consistency, multi‑turn dialogue, and staying in character.
• 5. Proficient in Python and PyTorch, and comfortable with the Hugging Face / Transformers training stack.
• 6. Preferred: experience with LLM agents (memory, planning, or tool use), LLM applications in games, or a publication at a major NLP/ML venue (ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML).

Equal Employment Opportunity at Tencent

As an equal opportunity employer, we firmly believe that diverse voices fuel our innovation and allow us to better serve our users and the community. We foster an environment where every employee of Tencent feels supported and inspired to achieve individual and common goals.

Who we are

Tencent is a world‑leading internet and technology company that develops innovative products and services to improve the quality of life for people around the world.

Equal Employment Opportunity at Tencent

As an equal opportunity employer, we firmly believe that diverse voices fuel our innovation and allow us to better serve our users and the community. We foster an environment where every employee of Tencent feels supported and inspired to achieve individual and common goals.