LLM Research Intern

Sony Research India Pvt. Ltd.; Bengaluru; Remote; INR 446,000 - 670,000; Full time

Job summary

Sony Research India, based in India, invites a six-month paid internship focused on deep research and rapid prototyping with Large Language Models for multilingual language understanding and translation in entertainment content. The role emphasizes hypothesis-driven experiments over routine fine-tuning, with collaboration alongside senior researchers.

Candidates should have PhD/Masters in CS or a Bachelor's with hands-on Python experience in LLM fine-tuning, and be ready to work remotely within

Qualifications

• Proficient in Python and PyTorch for DL research.
• Hands-on fine-tuning of LLMs (LoRA/QLoRA, PEFT, Instruction Tuning).
• Experience in DL projects and knowledge of state-of-the-art LLMs.
• Strong research orientation and curiosity.

Responsibilities

• Research LLMs for multilingual understanding and generation.
• Study cross-lingual transfer, language interference and multilingual reasoning.
• Explore domain adaptation for entertainment content.
• Investigate when additional reasoning or context should be used.
• Experiment with RL, preference optimization, bandits for LLM/NMT.
• Prototype ideas with LLM/NMT frameworks and evaluate on benchmarks and entertainment data.
• Collaborate with researchers to publish papers, patents, prototypes.

Skills

Python

PyTorch

Fine-tuning LLMs

Deep Learning

LLMs Foundation Models

Education

PhD in Computer Science

Master's in Computer Science

Bachelor's with LLM fine-tuning experience

Tools

LoRA/QLoRA

PEFT

Instruction Tuning

Job description

Sony Research India is driving cutting-edge research and development in various locations around the globe, including laboratories in Japan, the United States, Europe, and Asia. We endeavor to create new technology, products, and services while sustaining Sony Group’s diverse businesses in electronics, entertainment, and financial fields. For our research centre to blaze a trail in the latest technologies, we seek to foster the growth of a diverse pool of research and engineering talent and create a technology talent bank to drive research excellence worldwide. Sony Research India is offering outstanding career opportunities around frontline technologies such as AI and data analytics.

What we are looking for:

• We are looking for a highly motivated individual to work closely with our research scientists on deep research and rapid prototyping with Large Language Models, with a focus on multilingual language understanding, translation, reasoning, and domain adaptation. The intern will investigate how modern LLMs can be adapted, analyzed, and improved for multilingual and entertainment-domain applications, while developing research ideas that can potentially translate into publications, prototypes, and production impact. The role is research-intensive: we are looking for someone who is interested in understanding why models behave the way they do and developing new methods, rather than primarily integrating existing models or running standard fine-tuning pipelines.

What you’ll do:

• Conduct research on LLMs for multilingual language understanding and generation, cross-lingual transfer, language interference, model behaviour, and multilingual reasoning particularly across Indian and international languages.
• Explore domain adaptation for entertainment content, including subtitles, dialogues, scripts, and conversational language.
• Explore reasoning and adaptive computation for translation, including when and how additional reasoning or context should be used.
• Where relevant, explore reinforcement learning, preference optimization, bandits, or other learning-based approaches for improving LLM/NMT behavior.
• Rapidly prototype research ideas using modern LLM/NMT frameworks and evaluate them on both research benchmarks and real-world entertainment data.
• Collaborate closely with research scientists to formulate hypotheses, implement experiments, analyze results, and contribute to research papers, patents, and internal prototypes.

Work Location:

• Remote within India.

Duration:

• This paid internship will be for six months, 9:00 to 18:00 (Monday to Friday), starting November first week of 2026.
• Ph.D. or Masters in Computer Science background, or Bachelor’s with hands-on experience with Python in fine-tuning LLMs for Language Processing applications.

Must Have Skills:

• Excellent coding skills, especially in Python and PyTorch
• Hands-on experience with fine-tuning LLMs (e.g., LoRA/QLoRA, PEFT, Instruction Tuning)
• Prior self driven Project experience in Deep Learning
• In-depth knowledge of the state-of-the-art in LLMs and foundation models.

Preferred SKills:

• Strong mathematical aptitude.
• Papers in top-tier conferences like ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, AAAI, and ACL.

Dreams & Curiosity:

Pioneer the future with dreams and curiosity.

Diversity:

Pursue the creation of the very best by harnessing diversity and varying viewpoints.

Integrity & Sincerity:

Earn the trust for Sony brand through ethical and responsible conduct.

Sustainability:

Fulfil our stakeholder responsibilities through disciplined business practices.

Sony Research India is committed to equal opportunity in all its employment practices, policies and procedures and to ensuring that no worker or potential worker will receive less favourable treatment due to any characteristic protected under applicable local laws.