PhD ML Researcher Intern: AI for AEC

Autodesk; Boston (MA); Hybrid; USD 119,000 - 162,000; Full time

Job summary

Autodesk Research is seeking a PhD Researcher Intern in machine learning to advance AI for the AEC industry. You will own a research problem, collaborate with researchers, and contribute to projects that shape how Autodesk brings AI to design and construction workflows.

The internship is a 12-week paid program running from Feb 1 to Apr 30, 2027, with Autodesk's Flexible Workplace approach—office, remote, and hybrid options based on business needs.

Qualifications

• Pursuing a PhD in CS/ML/Data Science or related field with graduation no sooner than Apr 2027.
• Research experience in graph machine learning on heterogeneous knowledge graphs (GNNs, graph transformers, link prediction, node classification, self-supervised learning).
• Experience with temporal or time-varying data via temporal graph models or time-series forecasting.
• Experience with uncertainty-aware prediction, including calibrated probabilities and learning from small or imbalanced data.
• Rigorous experimental practice: baselines, ablations, leakage-safe train/test splits, and label quality checks.
• Proficiency in Python and PyTorch (PyTorch Geometric or DGL a plus), and graph query languages.

Responsibilities

• Define and investigate an open research question in machine learning and AI for AEC data, from problem framing through experiments and results.
• Design and train AI/ML models, including graph-based and temporal models, on large, heterogeneous real-world project data.
• Build predictive models with reliable uncertainty estimates and evaluate them against strong baselines.
• Prepare, integrate, and validate data from multiple sources, including knowledge graph representations.
• Document methods and results, present findings, and potentially contribute to research publications.
• Work as an individual contributor within a research team.

Skills

Graph ML

Python

Uncertainty estimation

Experimentation rigor

Education

PhD in Computer Science / ML / Data Science / Civil Engineering / Construction Informatics

Tools

PyTorch

PyTorch Geometric

DGL

Cypher / graph query languages

Job description

Autodesk Research is seeking a PhD Researcher Intern in machine learning to advance AI for the AEC industry. You will own a research problem, collaborate with researchers, and contribute to projects that shape how Autodesk brings AI to design and construction workflows.

The internship is a 12-week paid program running from Feb 1 to Apr 30, 2027, with Autodesk's Flexible Workplace approach—office, remote, and hybrid options based on business needs.