AI Research Intern - Rotterdam

Bynder Labs is the applied AI research and prototyping team within Bynder. Our mission is to turn frontier AI research into production-grade capabilities that change how teams create, manage, and activate brand content on our Digital Asset Management (DAM) platform.

We work across the full AI stack: foundational components like embeddings, semantic search, and knowledge graphs, and higher-level capabilities like agentic AI workflows, AI-assisted search, brand compliance agents, and integrations with external AI platforms via the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Our work runs on AWS at enterprise scale and reaches Bynder's customers, some of the largest brands in the world.

As an AI Research Intern at Bynder Labs, you will be paired with a Machine Learning Engineer/Data Scientist as your daily mentor, embedded in real epics on our roadmap, and given the autonomy to take ownership of a meaningful slice of work. Depending on your interests and where the team needs leverage, your project may sit anywhere along our roadmap. Some examples are evaluating embedding models for AI Search, contributing to our Brand Compliance Agent, building evaluation harnesses for agentic systems, exploring prompt optimization algorithms, extending our LLM observability stack, or prototyping MCP-based integrations.

About the role

At Bynder, we enable brands to deliver exceptional content experiences that drive business impact. In an era of exploding content volume and complexity, brands including Spotify, Campari, and Lacoste trust Bynder as their single source of truth for creative content. We are leading the shift from management to AI-powered content orchestration. By integrating human-led, customizable AI Agents directly into our enterprise-grade infrastructure, we enable brands to augment their workforce and intelligently automate high-effort workflows without sacrificing brand integrity.

What you will do

• Take ownership of a focused research question on the Bynder Labs roadmap and drive it from literature review and prototyping through to evaluated experiments.
• Build prototypes and experiments using modern AI tooling, large language models on AWS Bedrock, embedding models, vector search on OpenSearch, agent orchestration frameworks, and the Model Context Protocol (MCP).
• Design rigorous evaluations for non-deterministic AI systems, including offline benchmarks, LLM-as-a-judge pipelines, and online experiments on real data.
• Stay up to date with recent research, summarise them for the team, and decide which ideas are worth implementing.
• Contribute clean, well-tested Python code to shared Labs repositories and follow the engineering practices used by the rest of Bynder R&D.
• Use our observability stack to understand how AI systems behave in production and propose improvements when they don't behave well.
• Communicate clearly: write up findings in concise documents, present results at Labs reviews, and translate technical work into language non-technical stakeholders can act on.
• Be proactive and propose improvements to your project, to our internal tooling, and to the way we run experiments. Bynder Labs runs on initiative.
• Collaborate with engineers and product managers from other Bynder squads to ship work that lands.

What you have

• You need to be available for a 6 months long full-time internship from July 2026.
• You need to be enrolled in a Dutch university throughout the whole duration of the internship, and the internship needs to count toward your study credits (e.g. via a learning agreement or stage-overeenkomst).
• You are studying Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science, Data Science, Information Studies, Computational Linguistics, Econometrics with a quantitative ML track, or a closely related programme at a Dutch university.
• You have completed, or are completing, coursework in machine learning fundamentals and deep learning, plus at least one of: Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing, Multi-Agent Systems, Reinforcement Learning, Knowledge Representation, or Software Engineering for ML.
• Strong Python skills. Comfortable with Git, the command line, and reading other people's code. Familiarity with at least one ML or LLM framework is expected, or the ability to pick one up quickly.
• Good interpersonal and communication skills.
• Enthusiastic and passionate about the work you are doing.
• Team player to help the team accelerate.
• Ability to collaborate with teammates from other disciplines to produce results.
• Advanced in the English language.
• Joining the Amsterdam or Rotterdam office for the team's anchor day each week.

Nice to have

• Hands-on experience with vector databases or building a small RAG system end-to-end.
• Built something with LLM tool use, function calling, or MCP.
• Familiarity with prompt optimisation literature or LLM observability tooling.
• Cloud experience, AWS preferred.

What we offer

• An exciting position in an international agile organization and expansive entrepreneurial freedom.
• Latest technologies, Apple gear and industry training.
• A dedicated mentor from the senior Bynder Labs team, with weekly 1:1s and a clear development plan.
• Free in-office lunch and drinks.
• Travel expenses.
• Great offices in the center of Amsterdam and Rotterdam.
• Flexible working hours.
• Competitive internship fee.