Handshake AI Research Intern, Summer 2026 at Handshake

San Francisco, California, United States

Handshake Logo
Not SpecifiedCompensation
Entry Level & New GradExperience Level
Part TimeJob Type
UnknownVisa
Artificial IntelligenceIndustries

Requirements

  • Current PhD student in CS, ML, NLP, or related field
  • Publication track record at top venues (NeurIPS, ICML, ACL, EMNLP, ICLR, etc.)
  • Hands-on experience training and experimenting with LLMs (e.g., PyTorch, JAX, DeepSpeed, distributed training stacks)
  • Strong empirical rigor and a passion for open-ended AI questions
  • Experience with RLHF, evaluation tooling, or data selection methods
  • Contributions to open-source LLM frameworks
  • Prior work on RLHF, evaluation tooling, or data selection methods

Responsibilities

  • Design and implement novel RLHF / GRPO pipelines
  • Develop instruction-following refinements for LLMs
  • Refine reasoning-trace supervision for LLMs
  • Evaluate new multilingual, long-horizon, or domain-specific benchmarks
  • Conduct automatic vs. human preference studies for LLM evaluation
  • Implement active-learning loops for data efficiency
  • Develop data value estimation and synthetic data generation strategies
  • Implement low-resource fine-tuning strategies for LLMs
  • Collaborate with senior scientists to own a scoped research project
  • Prepare and submit an archive-ready manuscript or top-tier conference submission

Skills

LLM
RLHF
GRPO
Data Labeling
Research
Evaluation

Handshake

Connects students with job opportunities

About Handshake

Handshake connects college students with job and internship opportunities through its platform. It serves over 15 million students, 1,500 universities, and 900,000 employers, focusing on early career recruitment. The platform allows universities to provide students access to job listings, career fairs, and recruitment events, while employers can post job openings and manage recruitment processes. Handshake's user-friendly interface helps students organize their job search and offers insights like company reviews. The company prioritizes data privacy and security, ensuring compliance with regulations like FERPA. Handshake aims to bridge the gap between students and employers, facilitating early career opportunities.

San Francisco, CaliforniaHeadquarters
2014Year Founded
$422.2MTotal Funding
SERIES_FCompany Stage
Cybersecurity, EducationIndustries
501-1,000Employees

Benefits

💰Equity and ownership in a fast-growing company.
🍼16 Weeks of paid parental leave
💝Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision
💻Handshake offers $500/£360 home office stipend
📚Generous learning & development opportunities and an annual $2,000/£1,500/2k€ stipend
🏦401k Match: Handshake offers a dollar-for-dollar match on 1% of deferred salary, up to a maximum of $1,200 per year.
🏝PTO

Risks

Emerging competitors like Fizz target Handshake's demographic with financial products.
Intuit's collaboration may draw students away from Handshake.
AI-driven skills demand may reduce engagement with Handshake.

Differentiation

Handshake connects over 15 million students with 900,000 employers.
The platform offers a user-friendly interface for job and internship applications.
Handshake ensures data privacy, complying with regulations like FERPA.

Upsides

Handshake's new social media-like interface boosts user engagement.
Growing student loan repayment benefits attract more employers to Handshake.
Demand for skills-based workforce aligns with Handshake's mission.

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