Research Intern, Agent RL Training

NewsBreak · Mountain View, California, United States · 4 months ago

Seniority: Intern
Employment: Internship
Company size: 501-1000
Salary: USD 35 – 50 / hour

agentic-ai ai cuda data-pipelines deepspeed distributed-training llm python pytorch recommendation-systems

About the Role

We are looking for a Research Intern to join our Agent RL Training team. You will be paired with a full-time employee as your mentor, working together to explore, from zero to one, how to apply large language models to NewsBreak’s core business, including content understanding, recommendation, agentic web browsing, and autonomous multi-step task completion.

This is a hands-on research role. You are expected to independently drive experiments, propose novel ideas, and iterate quickly. We value self-starters with deep intellectual curiosity and the drive to push boundaries in LLM post-training and agent capabilities.

Location: Onsite in Mountain View, CA office

What You’ll Work On

Collaborate with your full-time mentor to identify high-impact research directions for applying LLMs to NewsBreak’s products

Independently run end-to-end SFT experiments on LLM-based agents, and assist with RL-related exploration such as reward design and training iteration

Curate and build high-quality training datasets: instruction-following, preference pairs, agent trajectories, and synthetic data

Contribute to public publications; we encourage and support top-venue submissions during your internship

What We’re Looking For

Requirements

Highly motivated and committed: willing to put in extra hours when needed to push projects across the finish line

Genuine passion for research: you read papers for fun, tinker with models on weekends, and care deeply about advancing the field

Independently capable of end-to-end model SFT: with basic understanding of RL-based post-training methods (RLHF, DPO, PPO, GRPO, etc.)

Excellent taste in model behavior: able to reason about what “good” looks like across user-facing domains and articulate why

Strong Python and PyTorch skills

Preferred Qualifications

Publication at a top-tier venue (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, EMNLP, or equivalent)

Experience with multi-node distributed training (FSDP, DeepSpeed, Megatron-LM)

Proficiency in writing custom GPU kernels with Triton or CUDA

Experience building synthetic data pipelines for agent training

Familiarity with open-source RL frameworks: TRL, OpenRLHF, veRL/vLLM

Hourly Pay: $35- $50

The US base salary range for this full-time position is listed below. Pay may vary based on a number of factors including job-related skills, level, experience, geographic location and relevant education or training. At NewsBreak, we design our overall rewards package to attract top talents. Depending on the position, the role may also be eligible for discretionary bonus and options. Your recruiter can share more details during the hiring process.

Annual Base Pay Range

$35—$50 USD

CPRA Privacy Notice for California Candidates

Explore more jobs

About the Role

What You’ll Work On

What We’re Looking For

Requirements

Preferred Qualifications