RS: Toward Autonomous Data Management with FMs and AI Agents Intern 2026
About The Position
IBM Research takes responsibility for technology and its role in society. Working in IBM Research means you'll join a team who invent what's next in computing, always choosing the big, urgent and mind-bending work that endures and shapes generations. Our passion for discovery, and excitement for defining the future of tech, is what builds our strong culture around solving problems for clients and seeing the real world impact that you can make. IBM's product and technology landscape includes Research, Software, and Infrastructure. Entering this domain positions you at the heart of IBM, where growth and innovation thrive. We are looking for a talented and highly motivated intern to help advance our efforts in building autonomous data management systems. The work will include using foundation models (FMs) and AI agents for tasks such as data discovery, knowledge representation, data access and retrieval with querying, and automated data-driven insights. This is the core of the role: turning FMs and AI agents into dependable partners for real data work across modern data stacks. Our focus is on research and development for data workflow orchestration - taking natural language all the way to trusted insights across multiple tools and functions. This includes step-by-step planning and reasoning for complex data workflows, developing low-computational-cost inference techniques so FMs and AI agents can efficiently automate or assist users on data tasks, and advancing trustworthy data agents where gauging factuality, faithfulness, and transparency of outputs over structured and unstructured data is critical. In this context, uncertainty quantification and mitigation, along with improved planning and reasoning, play a central role, providing useful tools to strengthen user confidence, manage model error propagation, and enable uncertainty-aware post-training. Together, these efforts make agentic solutions more efficient, accurate, and trustworthy.
Requirements
- Pursuing graduate studies in computer science or related fields
- At least one main author research publication at a top conference in AI such as NeurIPS, AAAI, VLDB, SIGMOD, IJCAI, ICML, ICLR, and ICAPS
- Familiarity and working expertise with large language models
Nice To Haves
- Familiarity with knowledge graphs, SQL, RAG, Agentic frameworks
- Familiarity with reinforcement learning, AI planning
- Familiarity with prompt optimization techniques
Benefits
- employees may be eligible for up to 8 paid holidays
- minimum of 56 hours paid sick time
- IBM Employee Stock Purchase Plan
- paid family medical leave
- disability benefits to eligible employees where required by applicable law
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What This Job Offers
Career Level
Intern
Industry
Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services
Number of Employees
5,001-10,000 employees
