AI Researcher — Summer Intern

About Snorkel

At Snorkel, we believe meaningful AI doesn’t start with the model, it starts with the data.

We’re on a mission to help enterprises transform expert knowledge into specialized AI at scale. The AI landscape has gone through incredible changes between 2015, when Snorkel started as a research project in the Stanford AI Lab, to the generative AI breakthroughs of today. But one thing has remained constant: the data you use to build AI is the key to achieving differentiation, high performance, and production-ready systems. We work with some of the world’s largest organizations to empower scientists, engineers, financial experts, product creators, journalists, and more to build custom AI with their data faster than ever before. Excited to help us redefine how AI is built? Apply to be the newest Snorkeler!

About the Internship

This role offers a unique vantage point: you will conduct original research while witnessing how those ideas move through a high-growth startup’s Go-To-Market (GTM) motion to create measurable impact for leading enterprises and LLM developers.

You’ll work closely with Snorkel researchers on open-ended projects and produce clear research outputs (experiments, prototypes, internal writeups, and potentially publications depending on project fit and timing).

What You’ll Do

• Innovate Human-AI Interaction: Design new paradigms for distilling human expertise into model behavior
• Define Frontier Capabilities: Collaborate with leading labs to develop the data strategies unlocking the next generation of agentic, reasoning and multi-modal models.
• See Real Impact in Weeks - something about being able to impact the business in fast cycles

Example Project Areas

Projects vary by mentor and collaboration needs, but may include:

• Synthetic data generation + filtering for specialized tasks
• Evaluation datasets and benchmarks for LLM / RAG / agent behavior
• Data-centric methods for improving reliability, calibration, and failure-mode coverage
• Evaluating HITL data annotation processes, gaps, and improvements

What We’re Looking For

• PhD Researcher: Currently pursuing a PhD in CS, Math, or Stats with a focus on ML or NLP and a strong publication record (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, EMNLP).
• Builder-Thinker: You write clean, scalable code to validate your theories and are comfortable navigating complex codebases.
• Entrepreneurial Mindset: Curious about the business of AI—how startups scale, find product-market fit, and translate technical metrics into business ROI

Nice to have

• Prior work on evaluation, data curation, synthetic data, weak supervision, NLP, or multimodal ML.
• Experience collaborating with academic labs or participating in research programs.

Internship Details

• Duration: Summer (flexible start/end)
• Location: Hybrid (Redwood City/SF) 
• Compensation: Competitive, commensurate with experience

Why Snorkel AI Research

Snorkel offers the intellectual rigor of an elite academic lab with the velocity of a category-defining technology company. You will gain a macro-view of the AI ecosystem, working where the world’s largest models meet the world’s most complex data.

Be Your Best at Snorkel

Joining Snorkel AI means becoming part of a company that has market proven solutions, robust funding, and is scaling rapidly—offering a unique combination of stability and the excitement of high growth. As a member of our team, you’ll have meaningful opportunities to shape priorities and initiatives, influence key strategic decisions, and directly impact our ongoing success. Whether you’re looking to deepen your technical expertise, explore leadership opportunities, or learn new skills across multiple functions, you’re fully supported in building your career in an environment designed for growth, learning, and shared success.

Snorkel AI is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity employer and is committed to building a team that represents a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and skills. Snorkel AI embraces diversity and provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment. Snorkel AI prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type on the basis of race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local law. All employment is decided on the basis of qualifications, performance, merit, and business need.

We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please contact us to request accommodation.