Redmond Hiring Research Intern

Overview

Microsoft Research Internships offer a dynamic setting for research careers, with world-class research labs led by globally recognized scientists and engineers. The labs work on complex challenges across computing, healthcare, economics, and the environment.

Microsoft is hiring a Research Intern to make coding agents better, cheaper and faster through post-training, including reinforcement learning, fine-tuning, distillation, compression and inference optimization.

Coding agents now plan, edit repositories, run tests and fix failures across long, multi-step tasks. Making them reliable and affordable is as much a post-training problem as a modeling one. The team trains, evaluates and ships agentic coding models that power developer tools at scale.

As a Research Intern, you will own a research question from start to finish: 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.

Responsibilities

Research Interns put inquiry and theory into practice alongside doctoral candidates and leading researchers. They learn, collaborate and build a network that lasts. Interns also contribute to ongoing research and development.

During the 12-week internship, interns are paired with mentors and collaborate with other interns and researchers, present findings, and take part in the community. Research internships cover all areas of research and are offered year-round, though they typically begin in the summer.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications

• Currently enrolled full time in a Doctoral Degree program in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related STEM field.

Other Requirements

• Interns must be physically located at their manager's Microsoft worksite for the duration of the internship.
• Applicants must submit at least two reference letters, a cover letter and any relevant work or research samples. Reference letters can only be requested after the application is submitted, and they may not be requested for every candidate. Letter writers may want a heads-up in advance.

Preferred Qualifications

• At least one additional quarter or semester of school remaining after the internship ends.
• Research experience in LLM post-training (RL, SFT, preference optimization), model compression, or efficient inference.
• Proficiency in Python and PyTorch, 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 running RL for LLMs at scale with frameworks such as TRL, verl, OpenRLHF or DeepSpeed-Chat.
• Experience building or training code-generation models or coding agents, and working with benchmarks such as SWE-bench, LiveCodeBench, Terminal-Bench or HumanEval.
• Hands-on work with quantization, distillation, pruning or speculative decoding, and 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.

Compensation

The base pay range for this internship is USD $6,810 to $13,480 per month. In the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City metropolitan area, the base pay range is USD $8,920 to $14,610 per month.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Additional benefits and pay information is available on the Microsoft intern pay page.

Microsoft accepts applications and processes offers for these roles on an ongoing basis throughout the academic calendar (September to April). The position will remain open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted until it 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 a religious accommodation or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.