Announcing the 🤗 AI Research Residency Program

Hugging Face just opened applications for a new Research Residency Program, and the pitch is pretty simple: spend nine months paired with someone from the company's Science Team, pick a real research problem together, and try to publish something that actually matters. No PhD gatekeeping required.

What's notable here is who they're asking to apply. The program explicitly wants people who haven't had the usual on-ramps into ML research — folks who've been out of school for years, people without a traditional academic pipeline, anyone with programming chops and some math background (think calculus, linear algebra, or a solid open-source project) but no fancy pedigree. Hugging Face is framing this less as an internship and more as a deliberate attempt to widen who gets to shape the field.

There's also a values statement baked into the announcement that goes further than the usual diversity boilerplate. Hugging Face says progress in AI risks deepening existing inequalities for marginalized groups — people of color, working-class communities, women, LGBTQ+ people — and it wants applicants whose lived experience reflects those identities to specifically consider applying. That's a stronger ask than most companies make in a hiring post.

Logistically, it's full-time only, no moonlighting with a university enrollment or another job, and residents get benefits including medical coverage depending on location. But the team is fully distributed, so nobody has to relocate — you work from wherever you already are. Applications close April 3rd, 2022, which doesn't leave a huge window for people to pull a proposal together.