About the job
About Handshake
Handshake stands at the forefront of the evolving AI economy, serving as a vital career network that connects over 20 million knowledge workers, 1,600 educational institutions, and 1 million employers, including all Fortune 50 companies. Our platform is trusted for career discovery, hiring, and skills development, facilitating everything from freelance AI training gigs to internships and full-time careers. Our unique value proposition has resulted in exceptional growth, with our annual recurring revenue tripling in 2025.
Why you should join Handshake now:
Play a pivotal role in shaping the careers of individuals in the AI economy, impacting your community and peers.
Collaborate closely with leading AI labs, Fortune 500 partners, and top-tier educational institutions.
Be part of a team guided by experts from renowned companies such as Scale AI, Meta, xAI, Notion, Coinbase, and Palantir.
Contribute to building a rapidly expanding business with substantial revenue potential.
About the Role
As an AI Research Intern at Handshake during the summer of 2026, you will be integral to our research team, which specializes in developing data engines that drive the next generation of large language models. This internship will offer you the opportunity to engage in focused projects that could lead to publishable research contributions and immediate application within our production stack. The internship is set to commence between May and June 2026.
Projects You Could Tackle
LLM Post-Training: Explore innovative RLHF/GRPO pipelines, enhance instruction-following capabilities, and refine reasoning-trace supervision.
LLM Evaluation: Develop new multilingual and domain-specific benchmarks, conduct studies comparing automatic and human preferences, and perform robustness diagnostics.
Data Efficiency: Implement active-learning loops, assess data value, generate synthetic data, and devise low-resource fine-tuning strategies.
Each intern will own a defined research project, receiving mentorship from a senior scientist, with the goal of producing a manuscript suitable for archival or submission to a top-tier conference.

