RS: Toward Autonomous Data Management with FMs and AI Agents Intern 2026
Introduction
IBM Research takes responsibility for technology and its role in society. Working in IBM Research means you'll join a team who invent what's next in computing, always choosing the big, urgent and mind-bending work that endures and shapes generations. Our passion for discovery, and excitement for defining the future of tech, is what builds our strong culture around solving problems for clients and seeing the real world impact that you can make.
IBM's product and technology landscape includes Research, Software, and Infrastructure. Entering this domain positions you at the heart of IBM, where growth and innovation thrive.
Your role and responsibilities
We are looking for a talented and highly motivated intern to help advance our efforts in building autonomous data management systems. The work will include using foundation models (FMs) and AI agents for tasks such as data discovery, knowledge representation, data access and retrieval with querying, and automated data-driven insights. This is the core of the role: turning FMs and AI agents into dependable partners for real data work across modern data stacks.
Our focus is on research and development for data workflow orchestration - taking natural language all the way to trusted insights across multiple tools and functions. This includes step-by-step planning and reasoning for complex data workflows, developing low-computational-cost inference techniques so FMs and AI agents can efficiently automate or assist users on data tasks, and advancing trustworthy data agents where gauging factuality, faithfulness, and transparency of outputs over structured and unstructured data is critical. In this context, uncertainty quantification and mitigation, along with improved planning and reasoning, play a central role, providing useful tools to strengthen user confidence, manage model error propagation, and enable uncertainty-aware post-training. Together, these efforts make agentic solutions more efficient, accurate, and trustworthy.
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Skills and tasks of interest include:
- [LLM for code generation] Using foundation models for code generation specific to data tasks such as SQL or NoSQL for data retrieval, python code generation for analytical insights.
- [Knowledge Graphs, Multi-Modal FMs] Combining foundation models, knowledge graphs, multi-modal structured and unstructured data to improve data discovery and automated Text-to-SQL.
- [FM Inference] Improving FM inference for both answer quality and computational cost.
- [LLMs for DataOps] Creating generative-AI tooling for DataOps (e.g., data integration and flows), analogous to DevOps accelerators but for data engineering and analytics.
- [Efficient and Reliable AI Agents] Creating efficient AI Agents that can reliably operate as part of an autonomous system.
Required education
Bachelor's Degree
Preferred education
Master's Degree
Required technical and professional expertise
- Pursuing graduate studies in computer science or related fields
- At least one main author research publication at a top conference in AI such as NeurIPS, AAAI, VLDB, SIGMOD, IJCAI, ICML, ICLR, and ICAPS
- Familiarity and working expertise with large language models
Preferred technical and professional experience
- Familiarity with knowledge graphs, SQL, RAG, Agentic frameworks
- Familiarity with reinforcement learning, AI planning
- Familiarity with prompt optimization techniques
ABOUT BUSINESS UNIT
IBM Research is the organic growth engine of IBM and an innovation engine for our customers and partners. As part of this mission, IBM Research anticipates and examines 'What's Next in Computing' to ultimately create and integrate the technologies the world relies upon to solve big challenges and unlock new opportunities. We create and pioneer new markets for IBM, our partners and customers as exemplified in our ongoing quest to reach practical and large-scale quantum computing. Across IBM Research, we realize the power and potential to accelerate discovery with our partners and clients by combining the power of high performance computing, AI, and Quantum, all integrated through the hybrid cloud.
YOUR LIFE @ IBM
In a world where technology never stands still, we understand that, dedication to our clients success, innovation that matters, and trust and personal responsibility in all our relationships, lives in what we do as IBMers as we strive to be the catalyst that makes the world work better.
Being an IBMer means you'll be able to learn and develop yourself and your career, you'll be encouraged to be courageous and experiment everyday, all whilst having continuous trust and support in an environment where everyone can thrive whatever their personal or professional background.
Our IBMers are growth minded, always staying curious, open to feedback and learning new information and skills to constantly transform themselves and our company. They are trusted to provide on-going feedback to help other IBMers grow, as well as collaborate with colleagues keeping in mind a team focused approach to include different perspectives to drive exceptional outcomes for our customers. The courage our IBMers have to make critical decisions everyday is essential to IBM becoming the catalyst for progress, always embracing challenges with resources they have to hand, a can-do attitude and always striving for an outcome focused approach within everything that they do.
Are you ready to be an IBMer?
ABOUT IBM
IBM's greatest invention is the IBMer. We believe that through the application of intelligence, reason and science, we can improve business, society and the human condition, bringing the power of an open hybrid cloud and AI strategy to life for our clients and partners around the world.
Restlessly reinventing since 1911, we are not only one of the largest corporate organizations in the world, we're also one of the biggest technology and consulting employers, with many of the Fortune 500 companies relying on the IBM Cloud to run their business.
At IBM, we pride ourselves on being an early adopter of artificial intelligence, quantum computing and blockchain. Now it's time for you to join us on our journey to being a responsible technology innovator and a force for good in the world.
IBM is proud to be an equal-opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, pregnancy, disability, neurodivergence, age, or other characteristics protected by the applicable law. IBM is also committed to compliance with all fair employment practices regarding citizenship and immigration status.
OTHER RELEVANT JOB DETAILS
Supplemental 1 employees may be eligible for up to 8 paid holidays, minimum of 56 hours paid sick time and the IBM Employee Stock Purchase Plan. IBM offers paid family medical leave and disability benefits to eligible employees where required by applicable law.
This position was posted on the date cited in the key job details section and is anticipated to remain posted for 15 days from this date or less if not needed to fill the role.
We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable law.
Perks and Benefits
Health and Wellness
Parental Benefits
Work Flexibility
Office Life and Perks
Vacation and Time Off
Financial and Retirement
Professional Development
Diversity and Inclusion
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