AI Researcher Intern

About the role

HackerRank is advancing AI-driven Technical Interviewing, assessment of Integrity, and the measurement of Engineering skill to use AI assistance effectively in the agentic era. We are looking for research-oriented M.S./Ph.D. scholars to explore and develop novel Deep Learning architectures and build efficient, trustworthy AI systems. A key research direction is to develop a model-agnostic external Recursive Reasoning Engine that enables smaller models (SLM/SSM/Hybrid etc.) to solve complex, repository-grounded software engineering tasks with greater effectiveness, traceability, and lower inference cost.

Open problems

The agentic era is reshaping every layer of the hiring stack. These are some of the core problems you’ll be working across, none of them fully solved.

• Chakra: Building an autonomous AI interviewer that conducts, adapts to, and evaluates technical interviews end to end.
• Integrity: Detecting fraud and suspicious behavior across multiple signal types. The ways candidates game assessments change frequently, and the models need to keep up.
• Evaluation: Measuring technical skill in a world where AI writes the code. The old proxies no longer hold and the new ones have not been defined yet.

Your focus will shift across these depending on where the highest-leverage work is at any given time.

What you will do

• Research, Design, and Develop advanced Deep Learning models and novel Neural architectures.
• Explore architectures beyond Transformers, including State Space Models (SSMs), Liquid Neural Networks (LNNs), and Hybrid approaches.
• Design and implement Agentic AI systems, Recursive Reasoning Engines, and tool-augmented architectures.
• Fine-tuning of models using PEFT (e.g. LoRA, QLoRA etc.), and Knowledge Distillation
• Optimize model Performance, Inference Efficiency, Latency, and Memory utilization.
• Design rigorous experiments, evaluation frameworks, and benchmarks to validate research hypotheses.
• Translate cutting-edge research into scalable, production-grade AI systems.

Who you are

• M.Tech./M.S./Ph.D. in AI/ML or related disciplines.
• 2-3 years of experience in Deep Learning, Machine Learning, or Applied AI Research.
• Strong foundations in Linear Algebra, Probability, Statistics, Optimization, and Deep Learning algorithms.
• Proficient in frameworks like PyTorch/JAX, with hands-on model development experience.
• Demonstrated ability to implement, reproduce, and extend research papers, including building neural architectures from scratch.
• Strong understanding of experimental design, model evaluation, benchmarking, and statistical validation.
• Demonstrated research aptitude through publications, open-source contributions etc.

Even better if you have

• Understanding of Evaluation Benchmarks for S/W Engineering Tasks and Human-Agent Collaborations
• Familiarity with distributed computing, GPU acceleration, and scalable ML infrastructure.

You will thrive here if you

• You enjoy solving open-ended research problems and challenging established assumptions.
• You prefer first-principles thinking and rigorous experimentation over simply applying existing models.
• You are excited to explore next-generation AI architectures beyond traditional Transformers.
• You thrive in a fast-paced environment with intellectual freedom, ownership, and direct collaboration with leadership.
• You are passionate about turning novel AI research into efficient, scalable, real-world systems.