AI Research Intern (PhD) - Summer 2027

About the role

Atlassian is hiring a PhD Research Intern for its Machine Learning Research team, focused on large language models (LLMs), generative AI, conversational agents and AI optimization. The internship is paid, runs about 12 weeks between May/June and August/September 2027, and is preferred to be co-located to Seattle or in the Pacific Standard Timezone. It suits students who want hands-on experience in both foundational research and practical applications.

Key responsibilities

• Work with Research Scientists and Machine Learning Engineers to design, implement and evaluate experiments that improve the performance, efficiency and scalability of ML and LLM systems.
• Curate, preprocess and manage large-scale datasets for training and evaluation, ensuring data quality, diversity and reproducibility.
• Train, fine-tune and align large language models for tasks such as conversational AI, summarization, generative search and multimodal agents.
• Evaluate ML algorithms through experimentation and report performance insights, failure modes and improvement opportunities.
• Contribute to publications and presentations at internal workshops or top-tier academic venues.

Required profile

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field.
• Currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science or a related field; degree completion cannot be earlier than September 2026 - June 2027.
• Strong foundation in AI/ML, LLMs, modeling and/or optimization techniques.
• Strong communication skills and ability to collaborate with multidisciplinary teams.

Required skills

• Preferred: Python, NumPy, Pandas, Matplotlib, Hugging Face models and PyTorch.
• Preferred: experience with large-scale datasets, NLP and computer vision, and familiarity with state-of-the-art ML/AI research.
• Publications in top AI conferences or journals are an asset.

What we offer

• Paid internship with a base pay of $59-$76 per hour (Zone A), $54-$69 per hour (Zone B) or $49-$63 per hour (Zone C).
• Health and wellbeing resources and paid volunteer days among other benefits.