PhD Technical Intern — Vision AI

Centific • Redmond, WA

20h • Hybrid

About The Position

Centific is seeking a highly motivated PhD or MBA intern to join Centific’s Vision AI team for a 3–6 month engagement. This role is designed for doctoral or MBA candidates with a strong foundation in business analytics who want to apply their expertise within a cutting-edge AI platform environment. Working alongside senior researchers, AI platform engineers, and product owners, you will help advance the features and agentic AI workflows of our Vision AI platform (VAI 2.0), contribute to research, and support information security and compliance governance activities. This is a business-analyst-to-product-owner track role — not a software engineering position — and is ideally suited for candidates located near or willing to commute to the Redmond, WA area.

Requirements

• Currently enrolled in a PhD program in Business Administration or a related field, or pursuing an MBA at an accredited institution; candidates near the Redmond, WA area strongly preferred.
• Working knowledge of computer vision fundamentals (e.g., convolutional neural networks, transformers, generative models); deep expertise is not required but some proficiency or understanding is expected.
• Good command of Python and business analytics; deep learning frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow) are a bonus but not required.
• Hands-on experience with large-scale data processing and annotation workflows for the construction of product features.
• Familiarity with model training techniques such as transfer learning, self-supervised learning, and fine-tuning strategies.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with the ability to translate business and research insights into actionable platform features.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills; ability to clearly document and present research findings.

Nice To Haves

• Exposure to vision-language models or multimodal AI concepts (e.g., VLMs, CLIP-based architectures); academic familiarity is sufficient.
• Background in business intelligence, data analytics, or product analytics tools.
• Familiarity with model distillation, quantization, or efficient inference concepts.
• Prior industry internship experience in business analytics, product research, or a related field.
• Published or submitted research at top-tier venues (NeurIPS, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ICLR, ICML, or similar).
• Experience with AI governance, regulatory compliance, or information security frameworks is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with engineers designing and implementing computer vision models and pipelines for image classification, object detection, segmentation, and scene understanding; comprehend platform capabilities and translate them into features for agentic AI workflows.
• Conduct research on multimodal AI systems in collaboration with platform engineers; translate research findings into net-new features and workflows that help evolve the platform.
• Work with engineers performing automated quality assurance of multimodal AI systems and large-scale training datasets.
• Collaborate with AI and platform engineering teams to develop features and agentic AI workflows that build and optimize scalable data preprocessing and augmentation pipelines.
• Work with research and platform engineers to understand model performance; use agentic AI tools (e.g., Claude) to develop working features and workflows without direct engineering responsibility.
• Contribute to research publications, technical blog posts, or internal white papers as appropriate.
• Participate in cross-functional team meetings, sprint reviews, and research syncs with engineering and product stakeholders.
• Define and develop agentic AI workflows using tools such as Claude; translate business and research requirements into working, platform-ready features without direct engineering ownership.
• Partner with the InfoSec and platform engineering teams to collect and document artifacts supporting information security and compliance certifications, contributing to a safe and secure AI platform.

Benefits

• Competitive hourly stipend commensurate with PhD or MBA program year and experience
• Laptop and cloud compute credits provided
• Consideration for full-time opportunities upon PhD or MBA completion based on performance.

What This Job Offers

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