Foundation Models for Data Research Intern: 2025

Multiple Locations See All

Yorktown Heights

San Jose

Cambridge

Albany
Research
Internship

Foundation Models for Data Research Intern: 2025

Multiple Locations See All

Yorktown Heights

San Jose

Cambridge

Albany
Research
Internship

Introduction
IBM Research Scientists are charting the future of Artificial Intelligence, creating breakthroughs in quantum computing, discovering how blockchain will reshape the enterprise, and much more. Join a team that is dedicated to applying science to some of today’s most complex challenges, whether it’s discovering a new way for doctors to help patients, teaming with environmentalists to clean up our waterways or enabling retailers to personalize customer service.

Your Role and Responsibilities

This is for a 2025 summer internship with the following start dates: May – August or June – September for quarter system schools.

We are broadly interested in further improving the capabilities of foundation models (FMs) for a range of data management tasks such as data discovery, metadata enrichment, data access and retrieval with querying, and automated data-driven insights.
Topics of interest include research on interactive orchestration of data workflows such as natural language to data insights spanning multiple tools and functions, knowledge-driven data discovery and querying with graphs and mutli-modal FMs, step-by-step planning and reasoning for complex data workflows , and low-computational cost inference techniques for FMs to efficiently automate or assist users with data tasks.
We are looking for interns with skills and tasks of interest include:

[LLM for code generation] Research for effective use of foundational models for code generation pipelines specific to data tasks such as SQL for data retrieval
[Agents and Reasoning] Research for developing novel autonomous agentic systems to compete with Text-to-SQL on public leaderboards like BIRD and Spider 2.0
[Knowledge Graphs, Multi-Modal FMs] Research for novel ways to combine foundational models, knowledge graphs, and multi-modal data for improving tasks such as data discovery and automated text-to-sql
[FM Inference] Research for improving foundation models inference in terms of both answer generation and computational cost.

Required Technical and Professional Expertise

Applicants should be PhD & MS students pursuing graduate studies.
Pursuing graduate studies in computer science and related fields.
Having at least one Research publication at a top conference in AI.
Familiarity and working expertise with large language models.

Preferred Technical and Professional Expertise

Familiarity with knowledge graphs, RAG, agentic frameworks.
Familiarity with reinforcement learning, knowledge distillation and prompt optimization.
Familiarity with SQL.

Want to know what it’s like to be an IBMer?

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 an IBMer means you’ll be able to learn and develop yourself and your career, you’ll be encouraged to be courageous and experiment everyday, all whilst having continuous trust and support in an environment where everyone can thrive whatever their personal or professional background.

Our IBMers are growth minded, always staying curious, open to feedback and learning new information and skills to constantly transform themselves and our company. They are trusted to provide on-going feedback to help other IBMers grow, as well as collaborate with colleagues keeping in mind a team focused approach to include different perspectives to drive exceptional outcomes for our customers. The courage our IBMers have to make critical decisions everyday is essential to IBM becoming the catalyst for progress, always embracing challenges with resources they have to hand, a can-do attitude and always striving for an outcome focused approach within everything that they do.

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About IBM

IBM’s greatest invention is the IBMer. We believe that through the application of intelligence, reason and science, we can improve business, society and the human condition, bringing the power of an open hybrid cloud and AI strategy to life for our clients and partners around the world.

Restlessly reinventing since 1911, we are not only one of the largest corporate organizations in the world, we’re also one of the biggest technology and consulting employers, with many of the Fortune 50 companies relying on the IBM Cloud to run their business.

At IBM, we pride ourselves on being an early adopter of artificial intelligence, quantum computing and blockchain. Now it’s time for you to join us on our journey to being a responsible technology innovator and a force for good in the world.

Other Relevant Job Details

Location Statement

Supplemental 1 employees may be eligible for up to 8 paid holidays, minimum of 56 hours paid sick time and the IBM Employee Stock Purchase Plan. IBM offers paid family medical leave and disability benefits to eligible employees where required by applicable law. The compensation range and benefits for this position are based on a full-time schedule for a full calendar year. The salary will vary depending on your job-related skills, experience and location. Pay increment and frequency of pay will be in accordance with employment classification and applicable laws. For part time roles, your compensation and benefits will be adjusted to reflect your hours. Benefits may be pro-rated for those who start working during the calendar year. This position was posted on the date cited in the key job details section and is anticipated to remain posted for 21 days from this date or less if not needed to fill the role. We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable law.

Being You @ IBM

IBM is committed to creating a diverse environment and is proud to be an equal-opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, caste, genetics, pregnancy, disability, neurodivergence, age, veteran status, or other characteristics. IBM is also committed to compliance with all fair employment practices regarding citizenship and immigration status.

Key Job Details

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