Applied Research Intern (PhD), AI Agents at Sierra SF

Sierra is a platform for customer-facing AI agents used by brands such as GAP, SoFi and SoftBank. Its Applied Research team makes the models behind its agents better, faster and cheaper, and maintains benchmarks such as tau-bench.

Key responsibilities

• Own a research project from question to paper
• Push agent evaluation forward, for example by extending tau-bench
• Study how agents reason, use tools and follow policies, and where they fail
• Explore fine-tuning and reinforcement learning and measure the gains
• Work with real text and audio interaction data

Requirements

• Currently in a PhD in computer science, machine learning or similar
• Publications or submissions at venues such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL or EMNLP
• Strong experimental skills and honest reporting of results
• Fluent in Python and modern ML tooling such as PyTorch

Nice to have

• Research on LLM agents, tool use or dialogue
• Speech, voice or multimodal models

Location and schedule

• San Francisco office, in person Monday to Thursday
• Flexible duration and start date

Salary and benefits

Pay is not stated in the posting.

How to apply

Apply on the company's own site.