Research Scientist - Summer Intern 2025

Kensho is a 125-person Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) company, centered around providing cutting-edge solutions to meet the challenges of some of the largest and most successful businesses and institutions. We are owned by S&P Global and operate independently. Our toolkit illuminates insights by helping the world better understand, process, and leverage messy data. Specifically, Kensho’s solutions largely involve speech recognition (ASR), entity linking (NED), structured document extraction, automated database linking, text classification, and more.  

At Kensho, we hire talented people and give them the freedom, support, and resources needed to accomplish our shared goals. We believe in flexibility-first and give our employees the opportunity to work from where they feel most productive and engaged (must be in the United States). We also value in-person collaboration, so there may be times when travel to one of our Kensho hubs (e.g., Cambridge, MA or NYC) will be required for team meetings or company events.

Are you looking to solve hard problems and enjoy working with teammates’ with diverse perspectives? If so, we would love to help you excel here at Kensho. We are a collaborative group of experienced Machine Learning Engineers and Research Scientists, whose academic backgrounds include doctorate degrees in NLP, theoretical physics, statistics, etc. We take pride in our team-based, tightly-knit startup Kenshin community, which fosters continuous learning and a communicative environment – allowing us to tackle the biggest challenges in data.

At Kensho, we hire talented people and give them the freedom, support, and resources needed to accomplish our shared goals. We value in-person collaboration, therefore interns will be required to work out of the Cambridge HQ or our New York City office!

About The R&D Team

Our R&D Team was created from scratch in early-2022 with the mission of bringing cutting-edge innovation to Kensho and S&P Global at large. Our small – but growing – world-class team of NLP researchers prioritizes publishing (e.g., 3 papers at ACL), and we maintain close ties with academia (e.g., collaborations w/ universities, and our Head of R&D teaches NLP at MIT). Since our inception, we have regularly presented our work to the senior members (e.g., CEO, CFO) of S&P Global and in turn have had our research and models mentioned in S&P’s Earning Reports. Our research with large language models has created several new, large Generative AI projects throughout Kensho.

About The Role

As a research scientist intern, you will be a core member of our lab and will work on a high-impact project that best aligns with your experience and research interests. You will be paired with a full-time Research Scientist mentor and will have the opportunity to present your work to all of Kensho.

You will have the opportunity to attend all of our company-wide social events. At Kensho, we believe in flexibility-first, and we give our employees the opportunity to work from where they feel most productive and engaged (must be in the United States). Yet, we also value in-person collaboration, so interns are welcome and encouraged to work from the Cambridge HQ!

You will actively conduct and publish research that concerns one or more of the following core NLP areas:

• Reasoning (e.g, numerical question-answering)
• Long-form question Answering (e.g., for documents over 100+ pages long)
• LLM Alignment and Calibration
• Chart/Figure Understanding
  
  

What You’ll Do

• Move the needle on unsolved problems in cross-domain NLP by conducting original research – with the goal of publishing your work in a top conference
• Specifically, develop novel NLP algorithms and models using state-of-the-art techniques within deep learning
• Write clean, readable research code in PyTorch (not expected to write production-level code)
• Collaborate with other research scientists, engineering leaders, and product managers to identify the most promising problems to go after
• Contribute to a stellar engineering culture that values simplicity and function rooted in excellent design, documentation, testing, and code
  
  

Who You Are

• Currently enrolled in a PhD or Master’s program (e.g., Computer Science, Linguistics, or a related technical field), with the expectation of returning to school after completion of the internship
• Experienced and comfortable reading and writing research papers in NLP
• Have published in top ML/NLP conferences (e.g., ACL, NAACL, EMNLP, NeurIPS, ICML)
• Relevant work experience (e.g., via internships, full-time, or at a lab)
• Fluency in PyTorch
  
  

Technologies And Tools We Love

• ML: PyTorch, Weights & Biases
• Deployment: Airflow, Docker, Kubernetes, AWS
• Datastores: S3
  
  

About Kensho

Kensho is an Artificial Intelligence company that builds solutions to uncover insights in messy and unstructured data that enable critical workflows and empower businesses to make decisions with conviction. 

Kensho was founded in 2013 and was acquired by S&P Global in 2018. Kensho continues to operate as a startup in order to maintain our distinct, independent brand and to promote our breakthrough, innovative culture. Our team of Kenshins enjoy a dynamic and collaborative work environment that runs autonomously from S&P Global, while leveraging the unparalleled breadth and depth of data and resources available as part of S&P Global.  As Kenshins, we pride ourselves on maintaining an innovative culture that depends on diversity and inclusion. 

We are an equal opportunity employer that welcomes future Kenshins with all experiences and perspectives. Kensho is headquartered in Cambridge, MA, with offices in New York City, and Washington D.C. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or national origin.

Job ID: 307254

Posted On: 2024-09-06

Location: Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States