PhD Technical Intern — Vision AI

About Centific

Centific is a frontier AI data foundry that curates diverse, high-quality data, using our purpose-built technology platforms to empower the Magnificent Seven and our enterprise clients with safe, scalable AI deployment. Our team includes more than 150 PhDs and data scientists, along with more than 4,000 AI practitioners and engineers. We harness the power of an integrated solution ecosystem—comprising industry-leading partnerships and 1.8 million vertical domain experts in more than 230 markets—to create contextual, multilingual, pre-trained datasets; fine-tuned, industry-specific LLMs; and RAG pipelines supported by vector databases. Our zero-distance innovation™ solutions for GenAI can reduce GenAI costs by up to 80% and bring solutions to market 50% faster.

Our mission is to bridge the gap between AI creators and industry leaders by bringing best practices in GenAI to unicorn innovators and enterprise customers. We aim to help these organizations unlock significant business value by deploying GenAI at scale, helping to ensure they stay at the forefront of technological advancement and maintain a competitive edge in their respective markets.

About Job

PhD Technical Intern

Role Overview

We are seeking a highly motivated PhD or MBA intern to join Centific's Vision AI team for a 3–6 month engagement. This role is designed for doctoral or MBA candidates with a strong foundation in business analytics who want to apply their expertise within a cutting-edge AI platform environment. Working alongside senior researchers, AI platform engineers, and product owners, you will help advance the features and agentic AI workflows of our Vision AI platform (VAI 2.0), contribute to research, and support information security and compliance governance activities. This is a business-analyst-to-product-owner track role — not a software engineering position — and is ideally suited for candidates located near or willing to commute to the Redmond, WA area.

Key Responsibilities

• Collaborate with engineers designing and implementing computer vision models and pipelines for image classification, object detection, segmentation, and scene understanding; comprehend platform capabilities and translate them into features for agentic AI workflows.
• Conduct research on multimodal AI systems in collaboration with platform engineers; translate research findings into net-new features and workflows that help evolve the platform.
• Work with engineers performing automated quality assurance of multimodal AI systems and large-scale training datasets.
• Collaborate with AI and platform engineering teams to develop features and agentic AI workflows that build and optimize scalable data preprocessing and augmentation pipelines.
• Work with research and platform engineers to understand model performance; use agentic AI tools (e.g., Claude) to develop working features and workflows without direct engineering responsibility.
• Contribute to research publications, technical blog posts, or internal white papers as appropriate.
• Participate in cross-functional team meetings, sprint reviews, and research syncs with engineering and product stakeholders.
• Define and develop agentic AI workflows using tools such as Claude; translate business and research requirements into working, platform-ready features without direct engineering ownership.
• Partner with the InfoSec and platform engineering teams to collect and document artifacts supporting information security and compliance certifications, contributing to a safe and secure AI platform.

Required Qualifications

• Currently enrolled in a PhD program in Business Administration or a related field, or pursuing an MBA at an accredited institution; candidates near the Redmond, WA area strongly preferred.
• Working knowledge of computer vision fundamentals (e.g., convolutional neural networks, transformers, generative models); deep expertise is not required but some proficiency or understanding is expected.
• Good command of Python and business analytics; deep learning frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow) are a bonus but not required.
• Hands-on experience with large-scale data processing and annotation workflows for the construction of product features.
• Familiarity with model training techniques such as transfer learning, self-supervised learning, and fine-tuning strategies.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with the ability to translate business and research insights into actionable platform features.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills; ability to clearly document and present research findings.

Preferred Qualifications

• Exposure to vision-language models or multimodal AI concepts (e.g., VLMs, CLIP-based architectures); academic familiarity is sufficient.
• Background in business intelligence, data analytics, or product analytics tools.
• Familiarity with model distillation, quantization, or efficient inference concepts.
• Prior industry internship experience in business analytics, product research, or a related field.
• Published or submitted research at top-tier venues (NeurIPS, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ICLR, ICML, or similar).
• Experience with AI governance, regulatory compliance, or information security frameworks is a plus.

What You Will Gain

• Exposure to a production-scale AI platform serving the public sector, private industries, and public safety organizations — helping make communities more trustworthy and safer.
• Mentorship from senior researchers, AI platform engineers, product owners, and product managers with deep expertise in Vision AI, data-centric AI, and applied ML.
• Opportunity to contribute to research that directly impacts real-world AI products and services.
• Access to proprietary datasets, annotation infrastructure, and compute resources for research experiments.
• Rare opportunity to lead and contribute to information security and compliance certification efforts — an experience few interns will have access to, placing you at the cutting edge of AI governance.
• Potential for co-authorship on internal or external publications arising from internship work.
• Consideration for full-time opportunities upon PhD or MBA completion based on performance.

Compensation & Logistics

Compensation: Competitive hourly stipend commensurate with PhD or MBA program year and experience; PhD candidates: $40–$45/hr; MBA candidates: $30–$35/hr

Location: Redmond, WA area preferred (hybrid); remote candidates considered on a case-by-case basis

Start Date: Flexible — rolling admissions, positions filled as qualified candidates are identified

Duration: 3–6 months, with possibility of extension

Equipment: Laptop and cloud compute credits provided

Rate: $40 Per Hour

Centific is an equal-opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, ancestry, citizenship status, age, mental or physical disability, medical condition, sex (including pregnancy), gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, marital status, familial status, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. We consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements.