About the role#
As a Research Intern at Cua, you will work on infrastructure that allows AI agents to use real computers and applications. You will prototype, test, and benchmark multi-modal LLM-based agents. This role involves building data pipelines and orchestration systems while collaborating with our founding team to produce research, open-source tools, and community benchmarks.
What you'll do#
- Generate and curate large-scale, high-quality multi-modal data from GUIs, browsers, and system UIs.
- Design and test single-agent and multi-agent systems for computer use.
- Automate benchmarking of agent orchestration, including scenarios with human-in-the-loop.
- Explore training and inference techniques such as RL-based agents to improve reasoning and action-taking.
- Develop benchmarks, tools, and datasets to evaluate agentic capabilities.
- Contribute to research publications and open-source projects.
What you'll need#
- Current enrollment in a PhD program in Computer Science or a related field, though strong Master’s students are considered.
- Proven experience in applied research with a solid publication record.
- Familiarity with modern multi-modal or reasoning agents like OS-Atlas, Qwen, or GUI-R1.
- Hands-on experience with PyTorch, Python, and cloud compute platforms such as AWS or GCP.
- Comfort designing experiments, evaluating models, and working with multi-modal data.
- Experience with reinforcement learning or agent-based training methods is a plus.
- Prior contributions to open-source projects or benchmark design are preferred.
- Familiarity with large-scale dataset construction and evaluation pipelines.
- Interest in bridging the gap between research and real-world engineering.
Location & details#
- This is a paid, full-time internship.
- Work is available on-site in San Francisco or remotely within the United States.
- Candidates based in or able to spend time in the San Francisco Bay Area are preferred.
About Cua (YC X25)
Cua is a software development company based in San Francisco. Founded in 2025, the firm creates an open-source framework for AI agents to operate within virtual containers. The technology runs on Apple Silicon at high speeds and supports various language models. It currently employs nine people.
How to get in at Cua (YC X25)
Securing an internship at Cua requires speed because early applicants are often reviewed before the candidate pool becomes unmanageable. Intern Insider sends an instant alert the moment a role matching your target is published anywhere, so you apply among the first and gain that initial visibility. Reaching out to the right person often beats submitting an application into a general queue. Intern Insider surfaces the recruiters behind the company roles so you can reach out directly to ask about the position or a referral, which materially improves your response rates.
