Role Overview

• You will try to break the systems we build and the models we protect, and turn what you find into something the team can act on: a reproducible attack, an evaluation that catches it, and a written account of why it works.
• Expect some mix of: eliciting unsafe behaviour from aligned LLMs and multi-modal models; prompt injection and tool-use abuse against agentic systems; automating attack generation and evaluation rather than hand-crafting one-off prompts; and measuring whether guardrails hold under pressure. Where RealmLabs' interpretability work gives you access to a model's internals, use it.
• We aim for a paper or public technical report out of every internship, plus attacks that stay in our evaluation suite after you leave.

Expected Background: Adversarial ML and Red Teaming

• Hands-on experience attacking or stress-testing models, from any direction: jailbreaks, prompt injection, adversarial examples, data poisoning, model extraction, or evaluating safety and moderation systems.
• Able to read a paper and implement its attack.
• (nice to have) Offensive security background outside ML: CTFs, vulnerability research, penetration testing.
• (nice to have) Familiarity with agentic systems and their attack surface — tool calls, retrieval, memory, multi-agent orchestration.

Expected Background: ML

• Machine learning tools: pytorch, huggingface, transformers, datasets.
• Applied deep learning and LLM experience.
  • Training and evaluating deep models.
  • (nice to have) finetuning LLMs, multi-modal LLMs.
• (nice to have) Familiarity with ML[NLP,LLM,Vision] interpretability methods, sparse autoencoders, linear probes — as a way of locating failure modes, not as an end in itself.

Expected Background: Software Engineering

• Development environments and tools:
  • unix, git, basic clouds usage on AWS and/or GCP
  • jupyter

• Programming:
  • python
  • (nice to have) “programming languages well-roundedness”
  • experience in statically-typed and functional languages

Compensation & Benefits

• Market aligned compensation for interns in the bay area.

Requirements

• Must be authorized to work in the USA or must be able to obtain CPT (Curricular Practical Training) approval from host university.