Research Intern - OneDrive and SharePoint; Summer

Position: Research Intern - OneDrive and SharePoint (Summer 2026)
** Overview*
* Research Internships at Microsoft provide a dynamic environment for research careers with a network of world-class research labs led by globally-recognized scientists and engineers, who pursue innovation in a range of scientific and technical disciplines to help solve complex challenges in diverse fields, including computing, healthcare, economics, and the environment.

The One Drive and SharePoint (ODSP) Applied Science team is an interdisciplinary group of researchers and engineers driving Artificial Intelligence (AI) innovation to transform how users remember, reason, act on their content and collaborate with others via Microsoft products. We tackle high-impact challenges to deliver tangible customer and business value by performing cutting-edge research and translating it into technologies that empower millions of users.

We are looking to hire several PhD candidates for 12-week summer internships based in Redmond, WA.

Research Interns will be expected to investigate, propose, implement, and evaluate new approaches within the broader areas of large language models (LLMs), Multimodal AI, Reinforcement Learning, Conversational AI, and AI Agents. As a Research Intern you will partner with product and engineering teams, to invent and deliver the future of content and collaboration  will be expected to present results internally at the end of the internship and to write up their work for publication at leading academic venues (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, CVPR, SIGIR, etc.).

Research Internships offer an opportunity to work in a supportive, inclusive and collaborative environment. You'll join a culture that values growth mindset and teamwork, providing you with opportunities to be mentored by world-class AI researchers and engineers, as well as other learning and career development resources as you help shape the future of content and collaboration in ODSP.

** Responsibilities*
* Research Interns put inquiry and theory into practice. Alongside fellow doctoral candidates and some of the world's best researchers, Research Interns learn, collaborate, and network for life. Research Interns not only advance their own careers, but they also contribute to exciting research and development strides. During the 12-week internship, Research Interns are paired with mentors and expected to collaborate with other Research Interns and researchers, present findings, and contribute to the vibrant life of the community.

Research internships are available in all areas of research, and are offered year-round, though they typically begin in the summer.

** Additional Responsibilities*
* + Conduct experiments and develop novel AI models and algorithms to address complex ODSP scenarios (e.g., intelligent document understanding, search/RAG, recommendation, generative experiences, proactive knowledge mining).

+ Design rigorous evaluation metrics, methodologies, and validation experiments to measure performance and quality of devised AI solutions and agentic AI workflows.

+ Conduct user studies to gather qualitative and quantitative insights, ensuring solutions align with user needs and improve real-world experience.

+ Build datasets (including leveraging privacy-preserving synthetic data techniques) to fine tune and benchmark models for ODSP applications.

+ Deliver models and algorithms for content understanding, enrichment, and use at scale, across a range of different modalities, including text, images, and video.

+ Apply your in-depth knowledge, problem-solving skills, and drive to solve new challenges in the field and realize your ideas in products used worldwide.

+ Present research findings and propose ideas in team discussions; share results through documentation and presentations and contribute to research publications.

+ Embody Microsoft culture and values.

** Qualifications*
* ** Required Qualifications*
* + Currently enrolled in a PhD program in Computer Science, Electrical/Computer Engineering, Data Science, Statistics, or related fields.

** Other Requirements*
* + Research Interns are expected to be physically located in their manager's Microsoft worksite location for the duration of their internship.

+ In…