Research Intern

What you’ll do

• Own a research project from start to finish, from framing the question and running experiments to writing and submitting a paper.

• Push agent evaluation forward, for example by extending τ-bench to new domains, modalities, or long-horizon tasks, or by building new ways to measure reliability and consistency.

• Study how agents reason, use tools, and follow policies over multi-turn conversations, and find out where and why they fail.

• Explore post-training methods such as supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning to improve agent behavior, and measure the gains rigorously.

• Work with large-scale, proprietary datasets of text and audio interactions to find research questions grounded in real customer problems.

• Work with researchers and engineers across Sierra, and where it makes sense, turn your findings into improvements in production.

What you’ll bring

• Currently pursuing a PhD in computer science, machine learning, or a related field.

• A research track record, such as first-author publications or submissions at venues like NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, EMNLP, Interspeech or ICASSP.

• Strong experimental skills: you design clean experiments, build careful baselines, and are honest about what the results do and do not show.

• Fluency in Python and modern ML tooling (for example, PyTorch, and LLM inference and training stacks).

• High agency and a builder’s mindset. You’ll work across the stack to get an experiment running.

• Clear, direct communication, both in writing and when presenting research.

Even better

• Research experience with LLM agents, tool use, or multi-turn dialogue.

• Experience designing benchmarks or evaluations, especially ones tied to real-world outcomes.

• Experience with supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, or long-horizon optimization.

• Experience with speech, voice, or multimodal models.

• Open-source contributions to ML research code or benchmarks.

Intern qualifications

• The internship is open to students currently enrolled in a PhD program.

• Duration and start dates are flexible. Interns are embedded with the Applied Research team and work under the guidance of a mentor.

• The internship is based in our San Francisco office. We are in person Monday through Thursday.

What we offer

We want our benefits to reflect our values and offer the following to full-time employees:

• Flexible (unlimited) paid time off

• Medical, dental, and vision benefits for you and your family

• Life insurance and disability benefits

• Retirement plan dependent on country of employment

• Parental leave

• Fertility and family building benefits through Carrot

• Lunch, as well as delicious snacks and coffee to keep you energized 

• Discretionary benefit stipend giving people the ability to spend where it matters most

• Free alphorn lessons

These benefits are further detailed in Sierra's policies, may vary by region, and are subject to change at any time, consistent with the terms of any applicable compensation or benefits plans. Eligible full-time employees can participate in Sierra's equity plans subject to the terms of the applicable plans and policies.