Gen AI Research Intern – Zoom GenAI R&D Team

Zoom • San Jose, CA

1d • $67 - $107 • Hybrid

About The Position

At Zoom, we are redefining how the world communicates. Our GenAI R&D Team is a dynamic group of researchers and engineers pushing the boundaries of Large Language Models (LLMs), agentic systems, and multi-modal AI. We invite passionate Ph.D. candidates to join us in a supportive environment where you can contribute to groundbreaking projects that have a direct, real-world impact on millions of users. Research Focus Areas Instead of rigid project silos, our internship program invites you to contribute to one of several core research pillars. Specific projects will be matched based on your expertise and current business needs, potentially covering: Intelligent Agents & Reasoning: Research and design autonomous agents capable of complex reasoning, planning, and tool usage. Work may involve enhancing memory management, context engineering, and function-calling capabilities to improve system interactivity. Advanced Model Training & Alignment: Explore cutting-edge techniques in post-training, including Instruction Tuning, Reinforcement Learning (RLHF/RLAIF), and on-policy training frameworks. Opportunities also exist to investigate efficient architectures such as Mixture of Experts (MoE). Evaluation & Data Foundations: Develop robust benchmarking frameworks and synthetic data pipelines. This pillar focuses on understanding system upper bounds, creating high-quality datasets for training, and ensuring models meet high standards of performance and reliability. Multi-Modal Understanding: Work on state-of-the-art vision-language models (VLMs), exploring novel training techniques and applications that fuse vision and text for richer user experiences.

Requirements

• Currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Electrical Engineering, or a related field.
• Strong foundation in Deep Learning, NLP, or Computer Vision.
• A proven track record in research, demonstrated through publications or impactful academic/industry projects.

Nice To Haves

• For Agents & Systems: Experience with agentic workflows, API integrations, memory systems, or system-level design.
• For Training & Alignment: Familiarity with Reinforcement Learning (RL), reward modeling, or advanced model architectures (e.g., MoE).
• For Data & Eval: Background in designing evaluation metrics, constructing benchmarks, or generating synthetic data for model training.

Responsibilities

• Research & Innovation: Design and implement algorithms within your focus area, conducting experiments to optimize model performance and propose new ideas that propel Zoom’s AI capabilities forward.
• Production Impact: Collaborate with engineering teams to translate research findings into practical solutions. Many projects prioritize immediate production value, such as building internal benchmarks or optimization recipes.
• Collaboration & Communication: Work closely with cross-functional teams, document your methodologies, and present your findings to the team. There are opportunities to contribute to internal reports and potentially external publications.

Benefits

• As part of our award-winning workplace culture and commitment to delivering happiness, our benefits program offers a variety of perks, benefits, and options to help employees maintain their physical, mental, emotional, and financial health; support work-life balance; and contribute to their community in meaningful ways.

What This Job Offers

• Career Level: Intern
• Education Level: Ph.D. or professional degree