PhD Intern, Applied Research in AI Agents

Sierra; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 55,000 - 83,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Mentorship by senior researchers

In-person SF office

Publication potential

Job summary

Sierra is seeking an Applied Research Intern to join our team in San Francisco. You will own a research project from framing questions through experiments to writing and submitting a paper, contributing to advancements in agent evaluation.

You will push evaluation forward by extending τ-bench to new domains and measuring reliability, while studying how agents reason, use tools, and follow policies in multi-turn conversations.

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, e.g. 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

PhD in CS/ML

Research track record

Python & ML tooling

Strong experimental design

Clear communication

Education

PhD student in CS/ML

Tools

PyTorch

LLM tooling

Job description

Sierra is seeking an Applied Research Intern to join our team in San Francisco. You will own a research project from framing questions through experiments to writing and submitting a paper, contributing to advancements in agent evaluation.

You will push evaluation forward by extending τ-bench to new domains and measuring reliability, while studying how agents reason, use tools, and follow policies in multi-turn conversations.