Applied Research Intern
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Nov 3, 2026. First seen by Alion on Oct 24, 2026.
Sit at the edge of research and production. You'll take a real workflow from a real team, make its failure modes measurable, construct the reward system, and post-train models that beat the frontier baseline on the work that matters. We hire interns who want to be researchers who ship.
What you'll own
Evaluation suites built from production traces: deciding what to measure, building the graders, and proving they track real quality.
Verifiers and reward models. Turning human corrections, outcomes, and standards of good work into training signal.
Post-training experiments end-to-end: hypothesis, data, SFT/DPO/RL runs, ablations, analysis, and the write-up that defends the win with numbers.
RL environments and agentic harnesses for the workflows we're specializing models for.
Reproducing recent post-training, reasoning, and agent papers, and translating the ones that work into our stack.
About you
Currently a student (BS / MS / PhD) in CS, ML, or an adjacent field, or recently graduated.
Strong empirical ML background. You've run post-training or RL experiments on LLMs and can explain what worked, what didn't, and why.
Rigorous about evaluation. You can spot a benchmark that lies and design one that doesn't.
Comfortable in messy production data. Real traces, not curated datasets, are your raw material.
Bias to ship. Your experiments end in a deployed model or a killed hypothesis, not just a doc.
Available for at least 12 weeks at meaningful intensity.
Bonus
Publications or OSS in post-training, RL, evals, or agents.
Experience with verifier models, synthetic data, or RL environments at scale.
Shipped research into a production system before.
Strong taste for what the field is over- vs. under-investing in.