Software Engineer - AI-powered Automation Intern

Introduction

At IBM, work is more than a job - it's a calling: To build. To design. To code. To consult. To think along with clients and sell. To make markets. To invent. To collaborate. Not just to do something better, but to attempt things you've never thought possible. Are you ready to lead in this new era of technology and solve some of the world's most challenging problems? If so, let's talk.

Your Role and Responsibilities

This is for a 2025 summer internship with the following start dates: May - August or June - September for quarter system schools.

At IBM Research, we invent things that matter to the world. Today, we are pioneering the most promising and disruptive technologies that will transform industries and society, including the future of AI, Blockchain, and Quantum Computing. We are driven to discover. With more than 3,000 researchers in 12 labs located across six continents, IBM Research is one of the world’s largest and most influential corporate research labs. Artificial intelligence is having a profound impact on all aspects of our lives and is transforming how work is conducted in every industry.

Today, AI systems are enabling businesses to personalize services, converse with customers, automate operations, optimize workflows, predict demand, and recommend next best actions. A common thread to our ambitious AI and Watsonx Research agenda is to understand how AI systems and algorithms can be designed responsibly and produce effective outcomes to their enterprise users.

In your role as a Research Software Engineer, you will interact with the brightest minds in AI and will help transform AI research ideas into scalable, robust systems that solve real-world problems and help us advance our research and development agenda on artificial intelligence including areas such as Natural Language Processing, CodeLLMs, Agents and Agentic Workflows, Generative AI Applications for Code, Time-Series, Business and IT Automation, and API Composition and Orchestration.

You have a proven interest and experience in implementing innovative software solutions and applications. In your role as AI Research Software Engineer, you will work in close collaboration with other researchers and engineers to create, maintain, and support world-class applications and/or infrastructure in support of our research and development agenda on artificial intelligence. This may also include any research related to your project. You will also deliver production-level code to support the commercialization of the resulting assets. Demonstrated communication skills are essential.

Required Technical and Professional Expertise

• Applicants should be BS students
• Programming skills in Python, Java, C++/C, etc.
• Backend storage technologies such as SQL and Non-SQL databases (Postgres, MongoDB, Cloudant, ElasticSearch, etc.)
• Experience in Kubernetes CI/CD tools and operators, IBM Cloud, and machine learning training pipelines
• Software engineering practices including agile techniques
• System building/debugging/testing skills

Preferred Technical And Professional Expertise

• Machine learning engineering: creating training pipelines and evaluating models using toolkits such as PyTorch, Tensorflow, and scikit-learn.
• Experience in web application development and frameworks including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JQuery, React, Flask, Node.js, etc.
• Qualitative and quantitative user research and user-centric design
• Solving analytical problems using rigorous and quantitative approaches
• Analyzing large-scale data from a variety of sources
• Previous experience publishing scientific results, e.g., at NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, IJCAI, ACL, AAAI, KDD, CHI, IUI, CSCW, or similar

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 every day, 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 ongoing 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 every day 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?