Research Intern, Inference (Fall 2026)

About The Role The Inference Research team is dedicated to building the next generation of efficient, scalable, and reliable serving systems for large foundation models, directly contributing to the mission of advancing open and transparent AI. Our work operates at the critical intersection of cutting-edge model architectures, high-performance systems engineering, and deep hardware optimization. We focus on co-designing software, algorithms, and models to significantly lower the cost and latency of modern AI systems. As a research intern, you will dive into the complexities of distributed inference, compiler-aware optimization, and novel inference-time computation strategies (such as speculative decoding and phase-aware execution). You will be tasked with co-designing and implementing cross-layer optimizations across models, systems, and hardware, with a focus on areas like KV cache design and large-scale serving architectures. Projects aim to unlock unprecedented performance and scale for foundation models, enabling faster serving, larger model deployment (e.g., Mixture-of-Experts), and robust, reproducible evaluation under realistic serving workloads. Responsibilities Design and conduct rigorous experiments to validate hypotheses Communicate the plans, progress, and results of projects to the broader team Document findings in scientific publications and blog posts Requiremen...