Applied Research Intern: AI Agents & Benchmarks

AItoolnavio; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 34,000 - 62,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible (unlimited) paid time off

Medical, dental, and vision benefits

Life insurance and disability benefits

Retirement plan

Parental leave

Fertility and family building benefits

Lunch, snacks and coffee

Job summary

Sierra is seeking an Applied Research Intern to work on a research project within our Applied Research team in San Francisco. You will frame questions, run experiments, and potentially publish findings that influence production agents used by millions of users.

You'll collaborate with researchers and engineers, design clean experiments, and contribute to evaluations of agent behavior, tools, and long-horizon decision making. This internship is based in person in SF.

Qualifications

• Pursuing a PhD in computer science, machine learning, or a related field.
• Strong publication record or submissions at top ML venues is desired.
• Must design and run rigorous experiments and report findings clearly.
• Fluent in Python and modern ML tooling; experience with LLMs is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Own a research project from start to finish, framing the question, running experiments, and writing a paper.
• Extend evaluation methods and benchmarks to new domains or tasks.
• Study how agents reason, use tools, and follow policies across conversations.
• Experiment with supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, or long-horizon optimization to improve agent behavior.
• Work with large-scale datasets of text and audio interactions for real problems.
• Collaborate with Sierra researchers and engineers to translate findings into production improvements.

Skills

PhD student

Research track record

Experimental skills

Python & ML tooling

Cross-team collaboration

Communication skills

Education

PhD in computer science / ML

Tools

PyTorch

Job description

Sierra is seeking an Applied Research Intern to work on a research project within our Applied Research team in San Francisco. You will frame questions, run experiments, and potentially publish findings that influence production agents used by millions of users.

You'll collaborate with researchers and engineers, design clean experiments, and contribute to evaluations of agent behavior, tools, and long-horizon decision making. This internship is based in person in SF.