Research Intern — Applied Reinforcement Learning 

PhD Research Intern — Applied Reinforcement Learning

Centific AI Research

Role Summary

Centific AI Research seeks a PhD Research Intern to design and evaluate reinforcement learning (RL) systems for agentic AI workflows. You will develop RL environments, reward models, and post-training pipelines for LLM-based agents, translating research into practical enterprise solutions.

Scope of Work

- End-to-end RL pipelines for agentic systems (simulation → training → evaluation)
- Alignment of LLM-based agents using RLHF, DPO, PPO, and emerging methods
- Design of reward functions, verifiers, and evaluation frameworks
- Simulation environments (digital twins) for enterprise workflows
- Scalable training and inference for RL-based systems

Example Projects

- Build a custom RL environment simulating a real-world enterprise workflow and train an agent using PPO or GRPO
- Develop a reward modeling pipeline from human feedback and evaluate alignment improvements
- Create an evaluation harness measuring reasoning, task success, and policy safety
- Prototype an agentic system with tool use and multi-step reasoning, integrated with RL training
- Document experiments, ablations, and findings for research andproductionization

Minimum Qualifications

- PhD candidate in CS, ML, or related field with research in reinforcement learning or agentic AI
- Strong Python and PyTorch skills with GPU-based training experience
- Solid understanding of RL fundamentals (MDPs, policy gradients, value methods)
- Experience with LLMs and post-training techniques (RLHF, DPO, PPO, etc.)
- Strong experimentation practices (ablation, reproducibility, clear reporting)

Preferred Qualifications

- Experience with RL environments (Gymnasium,RLlib, Stable Baselines)
- Research in offline RL, model-based RL, or hierarchical RL
- Publications at top ML conferences (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL)
- Experience with simulation, synthetic data, or multi-agent systems
- Distributed training and large-scale experimentation

Tech Stack

- PyTorch, CUDA; RL libraries (Gymnasium,RLlib, Stable Baselines)
- LLM frameworks and post-training tools (TRL, custom RLHF pipelines)
- Experiment tracking (Weights & Biases)
- APIs/services (FastAPI, gRPC); optimization (ONNX, TensorRT)

Logistics

Location: Palo Alto, CA(Preferred),Redmond, WA(Preferred)or Remote
Duration: 3–6 months

What We Offer

- Competitive stipend and real-world impactful projects
- Mentorship from researchers and engineers
- Access to modern GPU infrastructure
- Opportunities to publish and present research

Centific AI Research is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to an inclusive environment.