PhD AI Research Intern: RL & LLM Post-Training

AMD; Santa Clara (CA); Hybrid; USD 13,000 - 20,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

AMD Benefits at a glance

Job summary

AMD in Santa Clara, CA, is seeking a PhD candidate for an AI Research Intern specializing in RL and post-training language/code models. You will research, prototype, and evaluate RL-based methods, design experiments, and collaborate across teams to enable reproducible results.

The role emphasizes experimental rigor, publication-focused work, and exposure to cutting-edge GPU/ML workflows. Hybrid/onsite arrangements apply for the 2027 Summer internship.

Qualifications

• Must be currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or a related field.
• Knowledge of reinforcement learning and modern deep-learning methods.
• Experience implementing and evaluating machine-learning models using Python and frameworks such as PyTorch.
• Familiarity with LLM post-training, RLHF/RLAIF, preference optimization, or language and code agents.
• Publications at leading machine-learning or computer-vision conferences are preferred.
• Exposure to GPU computing or distributed training is beneficial.

Responsibilities

• Research and prototype RL methods for post-training language and code models.
• Explore policy optimization, preference learning, reward modeling, exploration, and credit-assignment techniques.
• Design and run controlled experiments using verifiable, preference-based, or simulator-generated feedback.
• Analyze failure modes such as reward hacking, policy degeneration, and training instability.
• Develop evaluation methods that reflect realistic engineering constraints.
• Collaborate with research and infrastructure teams on rollout generation, training, logging, and reproducibility.
• Document findings and contribute to technical reports and publications.

Skills

Reinforcement learning knowledge

Python programming

Experiment design and analysis

Research collaboration

Education

PhD in Computer Science, ML, Electrical or Computer Engineering or related field

Tools

PyTorch

GPU computing

Job description

AMD in Santa Clara, CA, is seeking a PhD candidate for an AI Research Intern specializing in RL and post-training language/code models. You will research, prototype, and evaluate RL-based methods, design experiments, and collaborate across teams to enable reproducible results.

The role emphasizes experimental rigor, publication-focused work, and exposure to cutting-edge GPU/ML workflows. Hybrid/onsite arrangements apply for the 2027 Summer internship.