About the role#
As an Applied Research Intern at Sierra, you will join our team to work on a specific research project. You will select a problem that impacts how AI agents perform in the real world, run rigorous experiments, and potentially publish your findings. You will work alongside a mentor and collaborate with researchers and engineers across the company to turn your findings into improvements for our production systems.
What you'll do#
- Own a research project from start to finish, including framing the question, running experiments, and writing a paper.
- Push agent evaluation forward by extending benchmarks like τ-bench to new domains or modalities, or by creating new methods to measure reliability.
- Study how agents reason, use tools, and follow policies over multi-turn conversations to identify failure points.
- Explore post-training methods such as supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning to improve agent behavior.
- Work with large-scale, proprietary datasets of text and audio interactions to ground your research in real customer problems.
What you'll need#
- 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, including the ability to design clean experiments, build careful baselines, and report results honestly.
- Fluency in Python and modern ML tooling, such as PyTorch and LLM inference or training stacks.
- High agency and a builder’s mindset, with the ability to work across the stack to run experiments.
- Clear, direct communication skills for both writing and presenting research.
- Experience with LLM agents, tool use, multi-turn dialogue, or designing benchmarks is preferred.
- Experience with supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, long-horizon optimization, speech, voice, or multimodal models is a plus.
- Open-source contributions to ML research code or benchmarks are also valued.
Location & details#
- This is a full-time, paid internship based in our San Francisco office.
- The role is on-site, with team members in the office Monday through Thursday.
- The internship term is rolling, with flexible start dates and durations.
About SIERRA AI
Sierra AI is a software development company based in Frisco, Texas. Founded in 2023, the startup focuses on artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing. It employs between 2 and 10 people. The firm builds custom software and automation tools for businesses.
How to get in at SIERRA AI
Applying early at Sierra AI is a distinct advantage because the team is small and reviews applications as they arrive. Intern Insider sends an instant alert the moment a role matching your target is published anywhere, so you apply among the first and get seen before the pile grows. Reaching out to the right person often beats applying into a general queue. Intern Insider surfaces the recruiters behind the company roles so you can contact them directly to ask about the position or a referral, which materially improves your response rates.
