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Applied Research Intern, Proactive Intelligence & Customer World Models (PhD / Graduate Co-op)

Block· 10109 Risk - Risk ML & DS
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Hybrid (Remote (US / Canada))co-opPosted 4mo ago

About the role

Graduate research internship focused on building foundations of proactive intelligence and customer world models, with end-to-end ownership of research problems and potential production impact.

Responsibilities

  • Framing research questions, developing methods, running experiments, and publishing findings.
  • Shipping successful work into production systems used by millions of customers and sellers.
  • Working at the intersection of representation learning, foundation models, reinforcement learning, causal reasoning, agentic systems, and product intelligence.
  • Contributing to one or more focus areas such as Customer World Models, Proactive Intelligence, Agentic Decision Systems, Learning from Feedback Loops, and Evaluation and Measurement.

Qualifications

  • MS or PhD student in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Statistics, Mathematics, Operations Research, or related field, returning to program after co-op.
  • Strong foundations in modern machine learning, including deep learning, optimization, representation learning, and foundation models.
  • Experience conducting independent research and translating ideas into working systems.
  • Fluency in Python and experience with PyTorch, JAX, or similar frameworks.
  • Evidence of research excellence through publications, open-source contributions, technical leadership, or equivalent work.

Skills

Required:Machine Learning fundamentalsPythonPyTorch or JAX

Benefits

  • Direct mentorship from Block researchers working on proactive intelligence.
  • Access to large-scale datasets, modern infrastructure, frontier models, and substantial compute resources.
  • Opportunities to publish and contribute to open-source projects.
  • Chance to shape foundational technology powering Block products.
  • Exposure to both scientific research and product deployment, with path from idea to impact.
Last updated Jul 8, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
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About Block

Block builds technology to increase access to the global economy.

Made up of Square, Cash App, Afterpay, TIDAL, Bitkey, and Proto, Block, Inc. builds technology to increase access to the global economy.

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