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Job Summary:
CSI-Cancer: USC Michelson Center Convergent Science Institute in Cancer is seeking an NLP Research Engineer PHD Intern. The role involves conducting advanced research in Natural Language Processing and developing scalable NLP systems, focusing on practical applications and model optimization.
Responsibilities:
• Conduct advanced research and stay current with state-of-the-art techniques in Natural Language Processing (NLP), Generative AI, and Large Language Models (LLMs), focusing on practical applications and scalable solutions.
• Design, develop, and optimize NLP models and algorithms for tasks such as semantic understanding, knowledge extraction, summarization, question answering, dialogue systems, and tool-augmented reasoning.
• Collect, clean, and preprocess textual and multimodal data for training and evaluation purposes.
• Contribute to the development of scalable, production-ready NLP systems, including model deployment, serving, monitoring, and lifecycle management, whether on cloud, on-premise, or edge infrastructure.
• Evaluate and refine existing NLP systems by incorporating new research, benchmarking performance, and addressing failure cases.
• Experiment with modern frameworks, open-source tools, and state-of-the-art foundation models using efficient adaptation techniques (e.g., low-rank adaptation, quantization-aware tuning, or other parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods).
• Participate in internal research reviews, code walkthroughs, and ideation sessions.
Qualifications:
Required:
• Solid grasp of NLP fundamentals, including both classical and modern techniques.
• Proficient in Python and familiar with ML frameworks such as PyTorch, JAX.
• Experience with NLP libraries like HuggingFace Transformers, spaCy, OpenNLP, or similar.
• Familiarity with prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and fine-tuning techniques for LLMs.
• Understanding of contemporary architectures, including agentic orchestration and coordination frameworks, and tool-augmented systems.
• Strong collaboration, communication, and documentation skills.
• Experience with efficient training/fine-tuning strategies (e.g., quantization, distillation, parameter-efficient tuning) is desired.
• Familiarity with agent-based systems, multi-agent collaboration, and structured reasoning techniques such as multi-hop inference and knowledge grounding is desired.
• Exposure to multimodal AI models and pipelines integrating text with images, audio, or structured data is desired.
• Familiarity with containerization, cloud platforms (AWS, GCP) or on-premise / edge deployments is desired.
• Contributions to open-source NLP/ML projects or relevant publications in top-tier venues (e.g., ACL, EMNLP, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, TMLR) is desired.
• Knowledge of responsible AI practices, including fairness, explainability, and privacy in NLP systems is desired.
• Pursuing or holding an M.S. or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Computational Linguistics, Applied Mathematics, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field.
• Must be enrolled in an educational program to be considered as an intern.
• U.S. citizenship or permanent resident status required.
Company:
USC Michelson Center CSI-Cancer is aimed at integrating patient, model system, and high-content single cell data to translate clinically observed correlations into a mechanistic understanding of the physical and biological underpinnings of cancer dynamics. Founded in , the company is headquartered in Los Angeles, CA, US, with a team of 51-200 employees. The company is currently Growth Stage.
