Research Intern - Coding Agents & Post-Training Optimization

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.

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.

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 least one of: LLM post-training (RL, SFT, preference optimization), model compression, or efficient inference.
• Proficient Python and PyTorch skills, with hands-on experience training or fine-tuning transformer models
• First-author publications at top venues (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, EMNLP, MLSys, ICSE, FSE) or equivalent research impact.
• Experience with RL for LLMs at scale using frameworks such as TRL, verl, OpenRLHF or DeepSpeed-Chat.
• Experience building or training code-generation models or coding agents, and with benchmarks such as SWE-bench, LiveCodeBench, Terminal-Bench or HumanEval.
• Hands-on work with quantization, distillation, pruning or speculative decoding; familiarity with serving stacks such as vLLM, SGLang, TensorRT-LLM or ONNX Runtime.
• Familiarity with distributed training (FSDP, DeepSpeed, Megatron) and GPU profiling or kernel work (CUDA, Triton).
• Clear communication, self-direction, curiosity, and a bias toward hands-on experimentation.
• Experience collaborating across teams, disciplines and cultures.

The base pay range for this internship is USD $6,810 - $13,480 per month. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $8,920 - $14,610 per month.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here: https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-intern-pay

Microsoft accepts applications and processes offers for these roles on an ongoing basis throughout the academic calendar (September - April).

This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance with religious accommodations and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.