Applied Research Intern (AI)

Location: San Francisco, United States; based in the San Francisco office and in person Monday through Thursday

Company

hirify.global develops customer-facing AI agents for major brands, with a focus on making agents more capable, reliable, safe, and useful.

What you will do

• Own an applied research project from problem framing and experimentation through paper writing and submission.
• Advance agent evaluation by extending benchmarks such as τ-bench to new domains, modalities, and long-horizon tasks.
• Study agent reasoning, tool use, policy following, and failure modes across multi-turn conversations.
• Explore supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning to improve agent behavior and measure results rigorously.
• Analyze large-scale proprietary text and audio interaction datasets to identify research questions grounded in customer problems.
• Collaborate with researchers and engineers and translate findings into production improvements where appropriate.

Requirements

• Currently pursuing a PhD in computer science, machine learning, or a related field; the internship is open to currently enrolled PhD students.
• Research track record, such as first-author publications or submissions to NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, EMNLP, Interspeech, or ICASSP.
• Strong experimental skills, including designing clean experiments, building careful baselines, and accurately interpreting results.
• Fluency in Python and modern machine learning tooling, including examples such as PyTorch and LLM inference and training stacks.
• High agency and a builder’s mindset, with the ability to work across the stack to run experiments.
• Clear, direct written and verbal communication skills.

Nice to have

• Research experience with LLM agents, tool use, or multi-turn dialogue.
• Experience designing benchmarks or evaluations 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 machine learning research code or benchmarks.

Culture & Benefits

• Work under the guidance of a mentor as part of the Applied Research team.
• Duration and start dates are flexible.
• The internship is primarily in person, with office attendance Monday through Thursday.
• Company values include Trust, Customer Obsession, Craftsmanship, Intensity, and Family.
• Benefits listed for eligible full-time employees include paid time off, medical, dental and vision coverage, retirement plans, parental leave, family-building benefits, meals and snacks, and a discretionary benefit stipend.