Handshake AI Research Intern, Summer 2026

Handshake • San Francisco, CA

1d

About The Position

Handshake AI builds the data engines that power the next generation of large language models. The research team works at the intersection of cutting-edge model post-training, rigorous evaluation, and data efficiency. This is a focused Summer 2026 internship where your work can ship directly into the production stack and become a publishable research contribution, starting between May and June 2026. Projects interns could tackle include LLM Post-Training (Novel RLHF / GRPO pipelines, instruction-following refinements, reasoning-trace supervision), LLM Evaluation (New multilingual, long-horizon, or domain-specific benchmarks; automatic vs. human preference studies; robustness diagnostics), and Data Efficiency (Active-learning loops, data value estimation, synthetic data generation, and low-resource fine-tuning strategies).

Requirements

• Current PhD student in CS, ML, NLP, or related field
• Publication track record at top venues (NeurIPS, ICML, ACL, EMNLP, ICLR, etc.)
• Hands-on experience training and experimenting with LLMs (e.g., PyTorch, JAX, DeepSpeed, distributed training stacks)
• Strong empirical rigor and a passion for open-ended AI questions

Nice To Haves

• Prior work on RLHF, evaluation tooling, or data selection methods
• Contributions to open-source LLM frameworks
• Public speaking or teaching experience (we often host internal reading groups)

Responsibilities

• Own a scoped research project
• Work towards an archive-ready manuscript or top-tier conference submission

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Intern
• Education Level: Ph.D. or professional degree
• Number of Employees: 501-1,000 employees