Design, implement, and evaluate applied research projects to improve alignment, safety, and evaluation of LLM-based guardrails. Work on experiments (e.g., synthetic data quality metrics, explanations for blocked content), deliver results with mentor guidance, and present findings to the team to shape product capabilities.
About Alinia
Role Overview
Minimum Qualifications
Preferred Qualifications
Why Join Alinia?
We are an early-stage AI startup on a mission to enable the safe and compliant deployment of AI Agents in regulated industries, worldwide, through our Regulatory Guardrails & Auditing platform. We ensure conversational AI agents adhere to companies’ business policies and regulations at scale, like Investment Guard.
We envision a future where compliance is encoded in any autonomous system, steered by human experts. The goal is to augment compliance experts’ capabilities, empowering them to become key enablers in the deployment of AI Agents in the most critical scenarios at scale.
Co-founders Ari and Carlos come from leading ML platform at Twitter and LLM governance at Hugging Face.
At Alinia, our Applied AI Research Interns play a pivotal role in exploring new possibilities and capabilities for Alinia's Alignment Platform. This role demands a scientific mindset, a technical understanding of LLMs, and LLM development experience. We expect our interns to be self-motivated, action-oriented and hands-on. During the internship, interns will be expected to design, execute, and deliver their solutions to key challenges our customers encounter with the safe and responsible deployment of LLM applications. However, we don’t expect our interns to work alone. A mentor will be assigned throughout the internship to provide guidance, planning, and support. Interns will also be expected to participate in weekly meetings where they will share progress and present results. This role is designed for students who are ready to apply their expertise actively and decisively within a dynamic development environment.
Developing a robust and holistic alignment strategy and platform that combines state-of-the-art evaluation and optimization techniques, Responsible AI best practices and the realities of running a business is a complex task with applied research at the center.
As an Applied AI Research Intern at Alinia, you will experimentally design, develop, evaluate, and execute a project to support the training, evaluation, or use of Large Language Model (LLM)-based guardrails. Example projects include, but are not limited to:
- The development of a robust, automated approach to quantitatively measure synthetically-generated data quality.
- The incorporation of explanations for our LLM guardrails to provide post-hoc rationales for why content was blocked.
- Pruning and quantization of LLMs without sacrificing out-of-distribution performance.
We strive to create intern projects that provide the right mix of problem solving, learning, and real-world application as possible while also aligning with the student’s interests. As a member of a small team, this role presents a unique opportunity to make direct contributions to a real-world product. Your work will directly shape the art of the possible for our customers and their clients.
- MS student in Computer Science, AI, Linguistics, or a related field.
- Proven experience in LLMs, ML, or NLP.
- At least one publication in reputable AI, ethics, or machine learning conferences and journals.
- Strong programming skills in Python.
- Experience with ML frameworks such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, or JAX.
- Demonstrated knowledge and practical experience in LLM training (Please note: this is a strict requirement for the position).
- PhD student in Computer Science, AI, Linguistics, or a related field.
- Contributions to open-source projects or public datasets in the field of AI.
- First-author publications at peer-reviewed AI conferences.
- Experience with synthetic data generation, LLM as a judge frameworks, LLM post-training.
- Experience with explainable AI (XAI).
- Cutting-edge tech: Work on one of the most important challenges in AI—alignment, safety, and trust
- Flexible work: Hybrid or remote work, with preference for CET time zone
- Collaborative culture: Small, experienced, mission-driven team
- Impact: Directly shape the technical foundation of an AI governance platform adopted by enterprises
Similar Jobs
Artificial Intelligence • Cybersecurity
Support cloud security by managing IAM across tools, maintaining security tooling and monitoring, investigating alerts, reviewing Terraform PRs for secure deployments, and tracking threat intelligence while learning cloud-native security practices.
Top Skills:
AWSAws IamAzureBashContainersEndpoint ProtectionGCPInfrastructure As CodeInfrastructure MonitoringKubernetesPythonTerraform
Artificial Intelligence • Cybersecurity
Design and build self-service platform tooling and "Golden Paths" to enable developer autonomy. Develop Terraform modules, CLI/APIs, GitHub Actions and GitOps pipelines (ArgoCD), integrate OPA for automated governance, and ensure observability (Prometheus/Grafana) across services.
Top Skills:
ArgocdAWSCrdsDastGithub ActionsGitopsGoGrafanaKubernetesOpen Policy Agent (Opa)OperatorsPrometheusPythonSastTerraform
Security • Software • Cybersecurity • Automation
Provide commercial and privacy legal support for SaaS agreements (SA, DPA, NDA), negotiate B2B contracts, maintain contract templates and playbooks, ensure privacy/security and regulatory compliance, advise business stakeholders, and implement processes and tools to scale the legal function.
Top Skills:
Contract Database SolutionDocusignFinance Invoicing SystemsGoogle SuiteGmailGoogle DocsProject Management SoftwareSlack
What you need to know about the Los Angeles Tech Scene
Los Angeles is a global leader in entertainment, so it’s no surprise that many of the biggest players in streaming, digital media and game development call the city home. But the city boasts plenty of non-entertainment innovation as well, with tech companies spanning verticals like AI, fintech, e-commerce and biotech. With major universities like Caltech, UCLA, USC and the nearby UC Irvine, the city has a steady supply of top-flight tech and engineering talent — not counting the graduates flocking to Los Angeles from across the world to enjoy its beaches, culture and year-round temperate climate.
Key Facts About Los Angeles Tech
- Number of Tech Workers: 375,800; 5.5% of overall workforce (2024 CompTIA survey)
- Major Tech Employers: Snap, Netflix, SpaceX, Disney, Google
- Key Industries: Artificial intelligence, adtech, media, software, game development
- Funding Landscape: $11.6 billion in venture capital funding in 2024 (Pitchbook)
- Notable Investors: Strong Ventures, Fifth Wall, Upfront Ventures, Mucker Capital, Kittyhawk Ventures
- Research Centers and Universities: California Institute of Technology, UCLA, University of Southern California, UC Irvine, Pepperdine, California Institute for Immunology and Immunotherapy, Center for Quantum Science and Engineering


