Overview
Research Internships at Microsoft provide a dynamic environment for research careers with a network of world-class research labs led by globally-recognized scientists and engineers, who pursue innovation in a range of scientific and technical disciplines to help solve complex challenges in diverse fields, including computing, healthcare, economics, and the environment.
We are hiring a Research Intern to make coding agents better, cheaper and faster through post-training: reinforcement learning, fine-tuning, distillation, compression and inference optimization.
Coding agents now plan, edit repositories, run tests and fix failures over long, multi-step trajectories. Making them reliable and affordable is a post-training problem as much as a modeling one. Our team trains, evaluates and ships agentic coding models that power developer tools at scale.
As a Research Intern, you will own a research question end to end; form a hypothesis, build the experiment, measure it on realistic agent benchmarks, and push results toward a paper or a product integration. You will work with researchers and engineers across model training, agent infrastructure and hardware acceleration.
Responsibilities
Research Interns put inquiry and theory into practice. Alongside fellow doctoral candidates and some of the world’s best researchers, Research Interns learn, collaborate, and network for life. Research Interns not only advance their own careers, but they also contribute to exciting research and development strides. During the 12-week internship, Research Interns are paired with mentors and expected to collaborate with other Research Interns and researchers, present findings, and contribute to the vibrant life of the community. Research internships are available in all areas of research, and are offered year-round, though they typically begin in the summer.
Qualifications
Required Qualifications
- Currently enrolled full time in a Doctoral Degree program in area in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related STEM field.
Other Requirements
- Research Interns are expected to be physically located in their manager’s Microsoft worksite location for the duration of their internship.
- In addition to the qualifications below, you’ll need to submit a minimum of two reference letters for this position as well as a cover letter and any relevant work or research samples. After you submit your application, a request for letters may be sent to your list of references on your behalf. Note that reference letters cannot be requested until after you have submitted your application, and furthermore, that they might not be automatically requested for all candidates. You may wish to alert your letter writers in advance, so they will be ready to submit your letter.
Preferred Qualifications
- At least one additional quarter/semester of school remaining following the completion of the internship.
- Research experience in at
