About GitHub: GitHub is the world’s leading platform for agentic software development — powered by Copilot to build, scale, and deliver secure software. Over 180 million developers, including more than 90% of the Fortune 100 companies, use GitHub to collaborate, and more than 77,000 organisations have adopted GitHub Copilot.
Locations: In this role you can work from Remote, United States
Overview:
GitHub is the home for software development, where we collaborate to build the world’s leading AI-powered developer platform. GitHub Applied Science partners closely with engineering and product teams to advance AI-driven developer experiences—turning research ideas into practical innovations that scale to millions of developers.
The Applied Science team works across multiple research and product areas, including AI evaluation and quality systems, agentic AI experiences, and model post‑training techniques to improve reliability, correctness, and usefulness. We focus on rigorous experimentation, rapid prototyping, and close collaboration to ensure scientific advances translate into real-world impact for developers.
We are looking for talented PhD students to join us for a research internship in 2026. This is a remote summer internship for 12 consecutive weeks, with start dates between May and June 2026.
Responsibilities:
In this role, you will work with one of the Applied Science teams at GitHub on a specialized research project focused on advancing AI-powered developer experiences. You will carry out research, run experiments, and build prototypes at the intersection of machine learning, software engineering, and large-scale systems.
Depending on the team and project, your work may involve improving how AI systems are evaluated and measured, exploring agentic approaches that enable AI to reason over tools, context, and goals, or investigating post‑training and data strategies to improve model performance in real-world developer workflows. You will collaborate closely with Applied Scientists and Engineering, and your work will contribute to product decisions, system design, and future research directions across GitHub’s AI platform.
Qualifications:
Required Qualifications:
- Currently studying for a PhD in Machine Learning, AI, Statistics, Computer Science or a similar field.
- Research experience in at least one of the following areas: machine learning, natural language processing, information retrieval, evaluation and experimentation, agentic systems, reinforcement learning or preference optimization.
- Available to work full time for a minimum of 12 weeks while not concurrently enrolled in coursework.
- 2+ years of experience building research concepts or Machine Learning systems in Python or another relevant programming language (e.g., Go, C++, Java, TypeScript).
Preferred Qualifications:
- Track record of working both independently and collaboratively.
- Published research or strong research artifacts related to AI systems, machine learning, or developer tools.
- Experience designing or working with evaluation methodologies, benchmarks, building datasets, or large-scale experimental pipelines.
- Familiarity with developer tooling, programming languages, or systems that operate on source code (e.g., compilers, analyzers, IDEs, or related infrastructure).
- Strong written and verbal communication skills, with experience collaborating across research and engineering teams.
- Experience building developer tools or with LLMs for coding.
Compensation Range: The base salary range for this job is USD $40.09 - USD $106.44 /Yr.
These pay ranges are intended to cover roles based across the United States. An individual's base pay depends on various factors including geographical location and review of experience, knowledge, skills, abilities of the applicant. At GitHub certain roles are eligible for benefits and additional rewards, including annual bonus and stock. These rewards are allocated based on individual impact in role. In addition, certain roles also have the opportunity to earn sales incentives based on revenue or utilization, depending on the terms of the plan and the employee's role. GitHub Leadership Principles:
GitHub values
- Customer-obsessed
- Ship to learn
- Growth mindset
- Own the outcome
- Better together
- Diverse and inclusive
Manager fundamentals
Leadership principles
- Create clarity
- Generate energy
- Deliver success
Who We Are: GitHub is the world’s leading AI-powered developer platform with 150 million developers and counting. We’re also home to the biggest open-source community on earth (and 99% of the world’s software has open-source code in its DNA). Many of the apps and programs you use every day are built on GitHub.
Our teams are dreamers, doers, and pioneers, leading the way in AI, driving humanitarian efforts around the globe, and even sending open source to Mars (and beyond!). At GitHub, our goal is to create the space you need to do your best work. We’re remote-first and offer competitive pay, generous learning and growth opportunities, and excellent benefits to support you, wherever you are—because we know that people flourish when they can work on their own terms.
Join us, and let’s change the world, together.
EEO Statement: GitHub is made up of people from a wide variety of backgrounds and lifestyles. We embrace diversity and invite applications from people of all walks of life. We don't discriminate against employees or applicants based on gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, race, religion, age, national origin, citizenship, disability, pregnancy status, veteran status, or any other differences. Also, if you have a disability, please let us know if there's any way we can make the interview process better for you; we're happy to accommodate!
