Research Intern

About the role

As a Research Intern, you'll join our applied research lab and work directly with senior researchers on projects that push retrieval beyond its current limits. You'll gain hands-on experience in tackling real-world search problems, from late interaction models to LLM-augmented retrieval. Each internship is designed to produce a tangible output — such as a blog post, paper, or open-source release — while giving you deep exposure to both research and product impact.

Research Directions

• Late Interaction: Next-generation fine-grained retrieval methods beyond ColBERT
• Omni-Modality: Designing truly multimodal retrievers
• LLM-Augmented Search: Studying how LLMs generate, rank, and consume retrieval results
• Evaluation: Creating evals that capture real-world, agentic use cases
• Data Work: Improving retrieval signals and datasets for stronger performance
• Interpretability: Understanding why retrieval models succeed or fail

What you'll do

• Own and execute a retrieval research project under the guidance of senior researchers
• Design, implement, and evaluate new approaches to information retrieval
• Explore multimodal search challenges across text, images, and beyond
• Investigate how LLMs can enhance or reshape retrieval pipelines
• Contribute to open science through papers, blog posts, or open-source models
• Provide feedback to help us continuously improve the internship programme

What we're looking for

• Prior enrollment in an undergraduate or graduate program
• Prior exposure to retrieval, embeddings, or adjacent domains (e.g., projects, papers, blog posts, or open source contributions)
• Proficiency in Python and ability to implement models from scratch
• Strong interest in Information Retrieval and its role in advancing AI
• Belief that single-vector similarity search is outdated, with enthusiasm for late interaction and beyond
• Collaborative mindset and willingness to learn from feedback

What We Offer

• Competitive internship compensation
• Closed mentorship from a world-class team
• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision coverage
• Visa sponsorship + relocation support
• Professional development budget
• Access to the best AI tools and subscriptions
• Team off-sites + conference attendance
• Transportation support
• Wellness support, including gym membership and sports club subscriptions
• Food support

Equal Opportunity Employer

Mixedbread is an equal opportunity employer committed to building a diverse and inclusive team. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.