AI Foundations - Research Scientist - Research Internship

Position: AI Foundations - Research Scientist - Research Internship: 2026
Introduction

IBM Research takes responsibility for technology and its role in society. Working in IBM Research means you'll join a team who invent what's next in computing, always choosing the big, urgent and mind-bending work that endures and shapes generations. Our passion for discovery, and excitement for defining the future of tech, is what builds our strong culture around solving problems for clients and seeing the real world impact that you can make.

IBM's product and technology landscape includes Research, Software, and Infrastructure. Entering this domain positions you at the heart of IBM, where growth and innovation thrive.

Your role and responsibilities

Join the pioneering AI Foundations Research team at IBM Research and contribute to shaping the future foundations of artificial intelligence. Our group of scientists, engineers, and designers is dedicated to conducting end-to-end research that delivers real-world AI impact through a rigorous, responsible, and open innovation framework. We are the team behind IBM's Granite open-source models, and our work spans multi-modal (vision, speech, language, code) and multi-lingual systems, data quality, data generation, novel model architectures, training recipes, governance and trustworthiness, and programming models for interacting with models.

As an intern, you will explore cutting-edge research areas, including new algorithms for training, fine-tuning, and inference time scaling, alongside pioneering work in generative computing and generative programming for language, code, and other modalities, all within a collaborative environment that bridges fundamental science and transformative engineering.

As an AI Research Scientist Intern, you will engage in the full research lifecycle to pioneer new advancements in artificial intelligence.

Your role will involve identifying core challenges, designing novel prototype solutions, and validating them through rigorous experimentation. You will conduct foundational research in critical areas such as novel training algorithms, efficient fine-tuning, and inference-time scaling for multi-modal models. Collaborating in small, mentored teams, you will be responsible for shepherding projects from ideation to completion. A key objective is to disseminate significant results through publications in leading conferences and patent applications, contributing to both the academic community and IBM's open innovation initiatives.

Required education

Bachelor's Degree

Preferred education

Master's Degree

Required technical and professional expertise

* Research

Experience with Modern ML:
Hands-on experience with and a deep theoretical understanding of Large Language Models (LLMs), Vision-Language Models (VLMs), and Transformer-based architectures.

* Strong Programming & Prototyping

Skills:

Proficiency in Python for rapid prototyping, experimental setup, and implementing large-scale machine learning systems.

* Rigorous Analytical & Problem-Solving Abilities:
Demonstrated strength in quantitative analysis, designing experiments, and deconstructing complex research problems.

* Proven Research & Communication

Skills:

A track record of innovation (evidenced by peer-reviewed publications or strong preprints) and the ability to clearly articulate complex technical concepts in both writing and presentations.

* Collaborative Research Mindset: A team-oriented approach with a commitment to rigorous, reproducible, and well-documented research practices.

Preferred technical and professional experience

* Research Excellence:
Strong publication record in top-tier conferences (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, CVPR, AAAI).

* Technical Proficiency:
Advanced expertise in ML frameworks (PyTorch) and full-cycle development of algorithms and systems.

* Specialized

Skills:

Hands-on experience with generative AI (LLMs) and multimodal models, from training to testing.

* Communication:
Demonstrated ability to present complex research and build high-impact technical demonstrations.

ABOUT BUSINESS UNIT

IBM Research is the organic growth engine of IBM and an innovation engine for our customers and partners. As part of this mission, IBM Research anticipates and examines 'What's Next in Computing' to ultimately create and integrate the technologies the world relies upon to solve big challenges and unlock new opportunities. We create and pioneer new markets for IBM, our partners and customers as exemplified in our ongoing quest to reach practical and large-scale quantum computing.

Across IBM Research, we realize the power and potential to accelerate discovery with our partners and clients by combining the power of high performance computing, AI, and Quantum, all integrated through the hybrid cloud.

YOUR LIFE @ IBM

In a world where technology never stands still, we understand that, dedication to our clients success, innovation that matters, and trust and personal responsibility in all our relationships, lives in what we do as IBMers as we strive to be the catalyst that makes the world work better.

Being…