2026 Future Talent Program - Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Generative AI Research Intern

Merck • Cambridge, MA

2d • Hybrid

About The Position

The Future Talent Program features internships that last up to 12 weeks and will include one or more projects. These opportunities in our Global Support Functions Division can provide you with great development and a chance to see if we are the right company for your long-term goals.
Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Generative AI Research Intern
Are you a current Ph.D. student passionate about helping computers learn to decipher the intricacies of language and eager to make a meaningful contribution to therapeutics development and patient lives? We are currently seeking an enthusiastic and analytical-minded individual to join our NLP team for a rewarding summer internship.
Role Description
As an NLP and Generative AI Research Intern, you will collaborate with our cross-disciplinary team of data scientists, bioinformaticians, and engineers. Your work will involve helping to create and improve NLP and generative AI models for unstructured and semi-structured data from various sources across our research and development pipeline. Key focus areas will include the likes of text classification, name entity recognition, relation extraction, entity linking, and question answering, and Agentic AI systems. Through this experience, you will gain an understanding of real-world NLP applications, while contributing to NLP research.

Requirements

• Current Ph.D. student focused on computer science or a related discipline with a strong emphasis on NLP, machine learning, AI or related techniques.
• Candidate must be able to commit to a full-time onsite position for 10 - 12 weeks starting June 2026 .
• Proficient in Python programming, version control with Git, and standard Python packages like pandas, NumPy, and matplotlib.
• Experience with at least one machine learning framework (e.g., PyTorch, Tensorflow) and NLP libraries (e.g., Spacy, General Architecture for Text Engineering / GATE).
• Familiarity with statistical learning, such as supervised, unsupervised, and weakly supervised learning, meta learning, reinforcement learning, especially in NLP contexts.
• Familiarity with Large Language Models, such as prompt engineering, post-training, agentic approaches.
• Strong teamwork, communication skills

Nice To Haves

• Experience with cloud and/or high-performance computing environments (e.g., AWS) is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to the development, testing, deployment, and refinement of NLP and generative AI models.
• Work closely with mentors to understand real-world NLP challenges and deliver automated data solutions to address them.
• Stay updated on the newest approaches in NLP and machine learning, and explore opportunities to incorporate them in our projects.
• Participate in meetings with stakeholders, presenting your findings, and progress to the team.

Benefits

• An opportunity to work at the forefront of NLP research and gain hands-on experience.
• Opportunities to co-author presentations, reports, and/or public code releases.
• A paid internship position, with potential involvement in a scientific publication as a result of research undertaken during the internship.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Intern
• Education Level: Ph.D. or professional degree