Applied Research Intern, Proactive Intelligence & Customer World Models

Team: Apollo, Block's Applied R&D group, which leads Block's efforts to build the Customer World Model (CWM): a continuously evolving representation of each customer's goals, context, history, constraints, and likely future needs, powering proactive intelligence across Block's ecosystem.

This graduate research internship (Fall/Winter 2026 co-op, 8 months, flexible start September 2026, for MS or PhD students returning to their program afterward) is not a traditional internship: you'll own a research problem end-to-end, from framing the question through experiments, findings, and shipping work into production systems used by millions of customers and sellers, working across representation learning, foundation models, reinforcement learning, causal reasoning, and agentic systems.

Requires current enrollment in an MS or PhD program in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Statistics, Mathematics, Operations Research, or related field, strong ML foundations, independent research experience, and fluency in Python with PyTorch or JAX.

Location: Remote (US/Canada), based out of the Bay Area, CA.