Applied AI Research Intern - Build & Benchmark Agents

Sierra; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 34,000 - 55,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible stipend

Medical benefits

Parental leave

Job summary

Sierra, a leading platform for customer-facing AI agents, is seeking an Applied Research Intern in San Francisco. You will own a research project, run rigorous experiments, and potentially publish findings that influence production agents used by millions.

The role emphasizes post-training methods, tool use, and collaboration with researchers and engineers across Sierra. You will join the Applied Research team, work with mentor-guided projects, and contribute to evaluating and improving agent

Qualifications

• Currently pursuing a PhD in computer science, machine learning, or a related field.
• A research track record, such as first-author publications or submissions at venues like NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, EMNLP, Interspeech or ICASSP.
• Strong experimental skills: you design clean experiments, build careful baselines, and are honest about what the results do and do not show.
• Fluency in Python and modern ML tooling (for example, PyTorch, and LLM inference and training stacks).
• High agency and a builder’s mindset. You’ll work across the stack to get an experiment running.
• Clear, direct communication, both in writing and when presenting research.

Responsibilities

• Own a research project from start to finish, from framing the question and running experiments to writing and submitting a paper.
• Push agent evaluation forward, for example by extending τ-bench to new domains, modalities, or long-horizon tasks, or by building new ways to measure reliability and consistency.
• Study how agents reason, use tools, and follow policies over multi-turn conversations, and find out where and why they fail.
• Explore post-training methods such as supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning to improve agent behavior, and measure the gains rigorously.
• Work with large-scale, proprietary datasets of text and audio interactions to find research questions grounded in real customer problems.
• Work with researchers and engineers across Sierra, and where it makes sense, turn your findings into improvements in production.

Skills

Research methods

Experiment design

Communication skills

Python

Education

PhD candidate in CS/ML

Tools

PyTorch

LLM tooling

Job description

Sierra, a leading platform for customer-facing AI agents, is seeking an Applied Research Intern in San Francisco. You will own a research project, run rigorous experiments, and potentially publish findings that influence production agents used by millions.

The role emphasizes post-training methods, tool use, and collaboration with researchers and engineers across Sierra. You will join the Applied Research team, work with mentor-guided projects, and contribute to evaluating and improving agent