Summer 2027 Intern - Tableau Research

Salesforce•Palo Alto, CA

About The Position

Salesforce is the #1 AI CRM, where humans with agents drive customer success together. Here, ambition meets action. Tech meets trust. And innovation isn’t a buzzword — it’s a way of life. The world of work as we know it is changing and we're looking for Trailblazers who are passionate about bettering business and the world through AI, driving innovation, and keeping Salesforce's core values at the heart of it all. Ready to level-up your career at the company leading workforce transformation in the agentic era? You’re in the right place! Agentforce is the future of AI, and you are the future of Salesforce. Tableau Research is an industrial research team focused on Tableau's mission of helping people see and understand data. The team generates new product and technology directions for Tableau and Salesforce, partners with internal teams and academia, and publishes at top academic conferences and journals. We are looking for a Research Intern to join Tableau Research for a 12-week internship. You will work on a project you and your mentor agree on together, designed to advance your research career and bring new ideas to future product roadmaps. Work closely with a mentor on the Tableau Research team, with frequent check-ins (often daily), and collaborate with researchers, engineers, designers, and product partners. Explore research topics including visual analytics, conversational analytics, semantics and data preparation, human-computer interaction, machine learning, and AI-powered analytical tools. Gain hands-on experience with industry research and product development, with the opportunity to co-author an academic paper that may continue beyond the internship.

Requirements

Currently enrolled in a PhD program and in good academic standing, with at least two years of research experience and a record of publishing at respected conferences or journals in areas such as data visualization, human-computer interaction, databases, or machine learning.
Build functional research prototypes quickly in a programming language or framework of your choice (for example JavaScript/React, Python, R, or C++).
Scope problems well, prioritize the most important questions, and deliver meaningful results within a fixed timeline.
Communicate clearly in writing and in person, work well with people from different backgrounds, and seek out feedback early and often.

Nice To Haves

Previous research internship experience.
Experience setting up user studies and analyzing qualitative and quantitative data.
Examples of user experience, interaction, or visualization design work to share if your project involves building interfaces.
Published at venues such as VIS, EuroVis, CHI, UIST, SIGMOD, IUI, CSCW, AAAI, ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, or NeurIPS.

Responsibilities

Scope a research question with your mentor that is ambitious and achievable within 12 weeks, then move quickly from idea to prototype.
Design and build research prototypes, and run user studies or other evaluations to test your ideas.
Share work in progress, present research updates at team meetings, and incorporate feedback along the way.
Deliver a final presentation and written summary of your project, with the goal of turning it into a publishable paper.