What are the responsibilities and job description for the 2026 PhD Residency - LLM Harness Engineering for Industrial Systems (Early Stage Project) position at X, The Moonshot Factory?
How You Will Make 10x Impact
General description: A machine learning/artificial intelligence specialist with experience in LLM and agent harnesses for industrial engineering, system engineering and/or chemical engineering
https://www.wired.com/video/watch/astro-teller-captain-of-moonshots-at-x-speaks-at-wired25
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2019-10-10/alphabet-x-s-astro-teller-on-bloomberg-studio-1-0-video
The US base salary range for this position is $109,000 - $157,000 benefits. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. Within the range, individual pay is determined by work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for your location during the hiring process.
Please note that the compensation details listed in US role postings reflect the base salary only, and do not include benefits.
An Equal Opportunity Workplace
At X, we don't just accept difference - we celebrate it, we support it, and we thrive on it for the benefit of our employees, our products and our community. We are proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements.
If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please contact us at x-accommodation-request@x.team.
General description: A machine learning/artificial intelligence specialist with experience in LLM and agent harnesses for industrial engineering, system engineering and/or chemical engineering
- Collaborate with the X Project team to design and develop Agentic LLM approaches to the project's mission
- Understand the project’s goals and challenges and conduct relevant literature surveys.
- Suggest agentic workflow solutions in which approaches/models can apply new and existing project workflows
- create/train/evaluate agentic AI models, features, components of large scale Agentic AI systems.
- Engage with the Intern community during the program, engaging with the X community, attending colloquia and tech talks.
- Location: X's headquarters in Mountain View, CA
- Start Date(s): Year-round rolling basis
- Duration: a flexible 4 mo. to 1 year program based on project team needs and your availability
- To be embedded into one of our confidential or public X projects
- To get paid competitively and receive benefits
- To be a part of a lively community of AI and ML Residents
- To attend tech-talks with AI leaders from across X
- Currently enrolled in a PhD program in a STEM field such as CS, Physics, Engineering or Mathematics/Statistics with a strong interest in machine learning and proficiency in general purpose programming.
- Demonstrated experience working with physical applications, hardware, or modeling real-world physics to build simulated environments or computational "harnesses" for physical equipment.
- Deep understanding of how state-of-the-art coding agents work internally (e.g., Claude Code, Codex CLI, Gemini CLI).
- Hands-on experience designing and building LLM-powered agent systems with tool design, context management, and multi-agent coordination.
- Open-source projects that demonstrate relevant skills and/or publications in relevant conferences and journals (e.g. NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ICASSP).
- Experience building verification/feedback loops for LLM agents
- Experience with harness engineering / context engineering
- Experience with physics engines, robotics simulators (e.g., MuJoCo, PyBullet, Gazebo), or CAD software to build test environments and digital representations of physical machinery.
https://www.wired.com/video/watch/astro-teller-captain-of-moonshots-at-x-speaks-at-wired25
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2019-10-10/alphabet-x-s-astro-teller-on-bloomberg-studio-1-0-video
The US base salary range for this position is $109,000 - $157,000 benefits. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. Within the range, individual pay is determined by work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for your location during the hiring process.
Please note that the compensation details listed in US role postings reflect the base salary only, and do not include benefits.
An Equal Opportunity Workplace
At X, we don't just accept difference - we celebrate it, we support it, and we thrive on it for the benefit of our employees, our products and our community. We are proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements.
If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please contact us at x-accommodation-request@x.team.
Salary : $109,000 - $157,000