Applied Scientist Intern, Lyft
Summer 2027
$64-$68/hour
3+ days a week in office
Ride sharing company
Posted today
Ride sharing company
1001+ employees
Posted today
$64-$68/hour
3+ days a week in office
1001+ employees
Company mission
To improve people’s lives with the world’s best transportation.
Role
Who you are
- Currently pursuing a PhD degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, or a related technical field, with a graduation date between December 2027 and Summer 2028 (required)
- Proficiency with Python and working in a production coding environment
- Hands-on experience with large language models or agent-based systems
- Strong foundation in machine learning and empirical model evaluation
- Ability to independently develop prototypes and work through open-ended technical problems
- Strong verbal and written communication skills, and ability to collaborate and communicate with others to solve a problem
- Familiarity with A/B testing, causal inference, or experimental design
Desirable
- Experience building production level ML inference, simulation, or evaluation pipelines
- Prior research experience with LLM agents, generative user simulation, or agent-based modeling
- Background in computational social science or behavioral modeling
- Experience evaluating AI systems against human behavioral data, qualitative studies, or controlled experiments
- Familiarity with prompting, tool use, memory, planning, or coordination in LLM-based agents
- Publication record in relevant venues such as NeurIPS, ICLR, AAAI, ICML or ACL/EMNLP
- Interest in building simulation platforms that support hypothesis generation, intervention testing, or human-AI system design
What the job involves
- Develop LLM-based Rider Agents that represent heterogeneous rider contexts, preferences, histories, and behaviors
- Build agent-based simulation environments for evaluating rider interactions with different product experiences and interventions
- Build evaluation pipelines to assess realism, robustness, and mechanism plausibility of simulated behavior against human data or established theory
- Analyze emergent behaviors and interaction dynamics in simulated populations under different user segment and marketplace conditions
- Conduct experiments and ablation studies on agent behavior, interaction dynamics, and simulation validity
- Apply the simulation framework to real Rider product problems and assess its usefulness for hypothesis generation, product iteration, and pre-experiment evaluation
- Communicate technical findings and recommendations to science, engineering, and product partners
Our take
Lyft has aimed for consistent growth, making sure to pitch itself as a more reliable and friendly ride-sharing option than its main competitor, Uber. Uber has a greater market share and operates globally, but Lyft hopes to compete by its focus on ride-sharing over Uber's more diversified business approach and as a more rider-friendly and greener alternative to Uber.
Operating only in the USA and Canada, Lyft is in a position of being less affected by global events than Uber but also more vulnerable to local conditions. As an example, while it doesn't face the regulatory hurdles around employment rights that Uber does, it is unable to balance out the cost of the unusually expensive US auto insurance across its operations.
In 2022, Lyft acquired PBSC Urban Solutions, a bike-share equipment and technology supplier, allowing Lyft to compete in new verticals and reaffirming its commitment to green transportation. It has also trialled and launched Lyft Assisted, where drivers help passengers from their door into the car to get to medical appointments. These developments chime well with Lyft's unique selling point as a friendlier and more environmentally aware ride-sharing app, whilst the acquisition of European competitor Freenow could add 6 million new riders to its platform in 2026.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
-2% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 14 rounds)
Jun 2018
$600m
LATE VC
Mar 2018
$200m
LATE VC
Total funding: $4.9bn
Company benefits
- Great medical, dental, and vision insurance options
- Mental health benefits
- In addition to 12 observed holidays, salaried team members have unlimited paid time off, hourly team members have 15 days paid time off
- 401(k) plan to help save for your future
- 18 weeks of paid parental leave. Biological, adoptive, and foster parents are all eligible
- Pre-tax commuter benefits
- Lyft Pink - Lyft team members get an exclusive opportunity to test new benefits of our Ridership Program
- Family building benefits
- Lyft Pink - Lyft team members get an exclusive opportunity to test new benefits of our Ridership Program
Company HQ
China Basin, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
John Zimmer
(Co-Founder)Originally an Analyst at Lehman Brothers, Zimmer then founded Zimride which was a private ridesharing company that pivoted into Lyft.
Logan Green
(Co-Founder)Founded Zimride, a private ridesharing company which later pivoted into Lyft.
Salary benchmarks
We don't have enough data yet to provide salary benchmarks for this role.
Submit your salary to help other candidates with crowdsourced salary estimates.
Share this job
View 95 more jobs at Lyft