AI Computing Research Intern

Naïve; Mountain View (CA); On-site; USD 32,000 - 52,000; Full time

Job summary

Naïve is an autonomous company builder that deploys AI employees to run entire companies. We’re a $120M company backed by prominent investors.

We’re building cost-effective, scalable AI systems that can operate fleets of agents with lower costs and higher reliability. As an intern, you’ll research and ship the cost/performance frontier for thousands of AI agents, optimize local model inference, and develop routing strategies to choose the cheapest model that can do the job.

Qualifications

• Strong systems and ML engineering background with Python and PyTorch.
• Deep understanding of how transformers run: attention, KV cache, memory bandwidth.
• Built and shipped a real project—OSS, side project, or internship.
• Experience with LLMs as tooling and objects of study via API calls and prompts.
• Move fast, take feedback, push back when you're right.

Responsibilities

• Research and ship cost/performance frontier for AI agents.
• Optimize local/self-hosted model inference and related techniques.
• Build model routing to select cheapest capable model.
• Benchmark and deploy across hardware (GPUs, edge, on-prem, accelerators).
• Push on agent infrastructure: orchestration, caching, context management, parallelization.
• Prototype recursive self-improvement loops.
• Own a research question end-to-end, from framing to production.

Skills

High agency

Systems ML engineering

Python & PyTorch

Profiling & optimization

Ship without hand-holding

Education

CS/EE/Math student

Tools

vLLM

TensorRT-LLM

SGLang

llama.cpp

Job description

About Naïve

Naïve is an autonomous company builder — we let businesses deploy AI employees to create/run entire companies. We’re a $120M company backed by Y Combinator, Liquid2, DEEPCORE (Softbank), and more.

What You'll Do

• Research and ship the systems that make running thousands of AI agents dramatically cheaper, faster, and more reliable
• Optimize local / self-hosted model inference — quantization, batching, speculative decoding, KV-cache strategy, tensor & pipeline parallelism
• Build model routing that sends every request to the cheapest model that can actually do the job — frontier API when it matters, local when it doesn't
• Benchmark and deploy across hardware — GPUs, edge, on-prem, alternative accelerators — and turn the numbers into real deployment decisions
• Push on agent infrastructure: orchestration, caching, context management, and parallelization for fleets of concurrent agents
• Prototype recursive self-improvement loops — agents that improve their own tooling, prompts, and evals
• Own a research question end-to-end — frame it, run the experiments, ship the result into production

The Role You're not here to write papers nobody reads. You're here to find the cost/performance frontier and ship past it. Every dollar and millisecond you save compounds across an entire fleet of AI employees. Our best interns take a benchmark on Monday and land a production cost win by Friday — and write the changelog entry themselves. This is research with a deploy button.

Must-Haves

• High agency
• Strong systems + ML engineering — comfortable in Python and PyTorch, can profile, optimize, and ship without hand-holding
• Real understanding of how transformers actually run — attention, KV cache, memory bandwidth, throughput vs. latency tradeoffs
• Built and shipped something real — side project, OSS, hackathon win, research artifact, prior internship
• Comfortable with LLMs both as tooling and as objects of study — API calls, prompts, tool use, and what's happening under the hood
• Move fast, take feedback, push back when you're right

Nice-to-Haves

• Hands-on with inference engines (vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, SGLang, llama.cpp)
• GPU kernel or low-level perf work (CUDA, Triton)
• Hardware benchmarking or deployment experience (cloud GPUs, on-prem, edge, alt accelerators)
• Built with agent frameworks
• Published, open-sourced, or blogged research/tooling
• Currently enrolled in a CS / EE / math program — or dropped out of one to build

P.S. If you're serious about this role, send Sean a connection request with a note over LinkedIn.