Agentic AI — PhD Intern (Autonomous AI Agent)
$51 - $56 USD hourly
Originally posted 6 November 2026 by the employer.
About the role
This internship focuses on designing, building, and evaluating reliable autonomous AI agent systems for multi-step engineering workflows. The system will maintain task state and context across longer-running tasks, use approved tools, and execute bounded, auditable, and recoverable actions.
What you'll do
- Build an autonomous agentic workflow that maintains task state and context across multiple steps and sessions.
- Develop tool integrations connecting the system to approved communication, planning, document, workflow, and engineering applications.
- Implement mechanisms for incorporating new information, updating task state, and resuming incomplete work.
- Develop state and provenance mechanisms for decisions, actions, outcomes, and feedback.
- Design guardrails for approval, permissions, bounded actions, failure recovery, and escalation.
- Assemble representative engineering workflows and measure completion rate, reliability, continuity, and human intervention against a baseline.
What you'll need
- Currently pursuing or recently completed a PhD in Machine Learning, Computer Science, Electrical or Electronic Engineering, Applied Mathematics, or a related technical field, with experience building and evaluating agent systems.
- Strong Python and software engineering skills, including modular code, version control, and reproducible pipelines.
- Hands-on experience building LLM agents with tool and function calling, orchestration, and context management beyond prompt-level experimentation.
- Demonstrated experience evaluating non-deterministic systems, including benchmark design, held-out test sets, and automated scoring.
- A portfolio of agent or LLM systems with inspectable code and an account of how they were evaluated.
- Working knowledge of application state, task management, context handling, and tool integration.
- Enrollment in an accredited college or university as of September 2027.
Nice to have
- Industry experience shipping agent or LLM-based systems to real users.
- Experience with agent frameworks, MCP or comparable tool-integration protocols, and stateful application design.
- Background in workflow automation, task orchestration, enterprise software, or event-driven systems.
- Exposure to engineering or test and measurement workflows spanning multiple tools and handoffs.
- Experience with retrieval-augmented systems, structured context, knowledge graphs, or provenance tracking.
- Familiarity with C++ for integration with internal engineering tooling.
Skills: agentic AI, LLM agents, Python, workflow automation, context management
More semiconductor jobs: Keysight Technologies jobs · EDA tools engineer jobs
This role has been open 0 days — well below the 22-day median for EDA/CAD Engineering roles.
EDA/CAD Engineering · AI EDA Design
|
Open roles in category
99
|
Median days open
22 d
|
Category median salary (all employers)
$209k
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, skills in demand, and who else is hiring
| Metric | Keysight Technologies | All employers we track in this specialty (99 roles · 28 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 12 | 99 |
| Open roles in the wider Physical Implementation family | 47 | 1615 · 117 employers |
| Median days open | 25 d | 22 d (+3 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $209k |
Skills observed across this category: agentic AI, LLM agents, Python, workflow automation, context management
Who's hiring in this category
- NVIDIA · 12 open roles · median 40 d
- NXP Semiconductors · 10 open roles · median 95 d
- Keysight Technologies (this employer) · 9 open roles · median 37 d
- STMicroelectronics · 8 open roles · median 3 d
- Synopsys · 7 open roles · median 15 d
- Cadence Design Systems · 6 open roles · median 71 d
How we counted: 99 open EDA/CAD Engineering (AI EDA Design) roles from 28 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 6 Nov 2026. Specialty figures count only roles carrying this exact specialty label, so an employer's related work in neighbouring specialties is not included there — it is counted in the wider Physical Implementation family row. Figures refresh nightly.