AI System Architecture Research Scientist Intern

What You’ll Learn

• Project Overview: Research the AI system architecture up to the rack level, breaking the memory wall for long-horizon agents: next-generation memory hierarchies that hold more context without losing accuracy or speed.
• Skills You’ll Learn:
  • Memory hierarchy design and optimizations for AI inference
  • Performance modeling and design-space exploration of AI systems
  • Characterization of agentic and long-context LLM workloads
  • Turning research into publications and future products

What You’ll Do

The Architecture Research Lab (ARL) is tackling two of the biggest challenges in AI today—memory bandwidth and communication bottlenecks. By leveraging Samsung’s world-leading memory technologies, we are developing next-generation AI systems that break through these limitations while improving developer productivity.

This internship explores how memory systems should evolve for agentic AI. AI agents work over long horizons, across many turns, and build up context faster than memory capacity and bandwidth grow. As a result, their accuracy and speed decline. You will research memory architectures and system optimizations that keep long-horizon inference accurate and efficient, evaluate them with performance models and accuracy studies, and turn the results into publications and into requirements for future memory products.

Location: Daily onsite presence at our San Jose headquarters in alignment with our Flexible Work policy

Reports to: Principal Engineer

• Characterize LLM and agentic inference workloads (multi-turn sessions, long and growing context, reuse across requests) and derive their memory capacity, bandwidth and latency requirements.
• Research memory hierarchies for AI inference that combine HBM, near-memory compute, emerging tiers such as High Bandwidth Flash, and host or CXL memory, including how model weights and KV cache are placed, moved, reused and compressed across them.
• Propose new architectures and system optimizations, from hardware features to runtime and memory-management policies, that keep long-horizon agents accurate within memory limits.
• Build and extend performance models and simulators, and run design-space explorations of different throughput, capacity and cost metrics.
• Measure the accuracy impact of memory optimizations on long-context and agentic benchmarks with open models.
• Drive the research from problem definition to results, working closely with architects, memory technologists and system-software researchers.
• Publish results at top-tier venues, contribute invention disclosures, and help turn research into product directions.
• Complete other responsibilities as assigned.

What You Bring

• PhD student currently pursuing degree, 3+ years studying in Computer Science preferred
• Must have at least 1 academic quarter/semester remaining
• Strong background in AI System architecture and memory systems: memory hierarchy, DRAM/HBM, data movement.
• Deep understanding of LLM and agentic inference (prefill and decode, KV cache, long-context workloads), and of how memory optimizations such as KV-cache compression or eviction affect model accuracy.
• Experience in performance analysis and modeling of AI systems, including roofline analysis, building or extending simulators or analytical models to evaluate architecture ideas.
• Hands-on research experience in managing model state across memory tiers: KV-cache paging, reuse, offloading, compression or eviction, or weight offloading for large and MoE models, in serving stacks such as vLLM, SGLang or LMCache
• Strong programming skills in Python and C/C++, and experience with PyTorch.
• First-author or major contributor in publications at top-tier computer architecture, systems or machine learning venues, preferred
• Collaborative, innovative and creative: you build relationships, welcome new approaches, explore new ideas and adapt quickly to change.
• An avid learner, you approach challenges with curiosity and resilience, seeking data to help build understanding.
• You’re inclusive, adapting your style to the situation and diverse global norms of our people.
• An avid learner, you approach challenges with curiosity and resilience, seeking data to help build understanding.
• You’re collaborative, building relationships, humbly offering support and openly welcoming approaches.
• Innovative and creative, you proactively explore new ideas and adapt quickly to change.

Hourly Base Pay Rate 28 - 68 USD