Applied Research Intern

About the Company

Block, Inc. builds technology to increase access to the global economy. Each of our brands unlocks different aspects of the economy for more people: Square, Cash App, Afterpay, TIDAL, Bitkey, and Proto.

Responsibilities

• Own a research problem end-to-end from framing to shipping
• Develop methods, run experiments, and publish findings
• Work on Customer World Models, Proactive Intelligence, or Agentic Decision Systems
• Build systems that reason over customer state and take actions in real environments
• Develop methods for continuous improvement via reinforcement learning and feedback loops
• Build evaluation frameworks to predict real-world performance and safety

Requirements

• Currently enrolled in an MS or PhD program in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Statistics, Mathematics, or a related field
• Must be returning to your program after the co-op
• Strong foundations in deep learning, optimization, and representation learning
• Experience conducting independent research and translating ideas into systems
• Fluency in Python
• Experience with PyTorch, JAX, or similar frameworks
• Evidence of research excellence through publications or open-source contributions

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with large language models and agentic systems
• Experience with reinforcement learning or reward modeling
• Experience with representation learning for structured, temporal, or graph data
• Familiarity with large-scale training and production ML systems