Electronic Arts

Electronic Arts is seeking high-performing students to join our world-class internship experience program. Summer 2026 will be better than ever as we bring all interns together on-site for orientation week and prep students for the future ways of work by offering remote and hybrid opportunities depending on your location. For more information about our Emerging Talent Program, visit https://www.ea.com/careers/interns-and-university-graduates

SEED is a pioneering group within Electronic Arts that combines creativity with applied research. We explore, build, and help define the future of interactive entertainment.

We exist at EA to deliver and foster inspiring innovation for our games and our players. We do this through exploration, research, prototypes, and never-ending curiosity. We collaborate with game teams and industry partners and also publish our research within our industry and to the public. We pursue long-term applied research while staying relevant to the present by delivering artifacts along the way to game teams and technology groups inside EA. Some of our research includes bringing digital characters to life, using machine learning for game AI and content creation, and developing novel real-time graphics & physics techniques.

The challenge

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown great promise when applied to various tasks in games, including game summaries, dialogue, and even gameplay. In the competition for hardware resources, games have been optimized for performance, and every computational resource is crucial. The challenge is to create Small Language Models (SLMs) that are as performant on the task at hand while being reduced in size to run concurrently with the game without affecting game performance.

We are seeking a highly motivated and driven PhD Intern in the area of LMs and games. We expect the intern to apply the latest state-of-the-art research to create small LMs that are suitable for real-time gameplay. This can include dialogue, decision-making making and planning for our NPCs in our games. Within this work, there are plenty of opportunities to consider how to evaluate models for games, integrate them with existing systems (such as game engines and games), and create a believable and authentic experience for our players. We expect, and encourage, the student to be willing to work with a game engine if that is necessary to complete the task. 

As a PhD Intern, you will:

• Perform a state-of-the-art study on LMs, games, and the applications of LMs on games

• Test and evaluate recent papers and open-source projects

• Identify and define some novel approaches and methods

• Plan and build a proof-of-concept demonstration

• Create and execute a full experiment suite to verify and benchmark results

• Analyze and evaluate the results and write a technical report, and share insights by giving presentations to the team

As a diverse team with solid goals, we provide autonomy and true influence to each member of SEED. We are looking for an open and curious person who gets a kick out of taking new ideas, investigating them, and adapting their application to games. You have a desire to explore new areas of game development—someone who is passionate, creative, communicative, and invested.

Qualifications

• Ongoing Ph.D. in Computer Science, Computer Graphics, Machine Learning, or any other relevant field 

• Experience in LLMs training and modeling, distillation, and RAG-based techniques. 

• Basic knowledge of principles for game programming

• You care about video games as a medium. 

If you want to be part of—and work with—some of the most incredible people in the field, then SEED is your team!

To learn more about SEED and our impactful work, check out https://seed.ea.com/

You must be available for a full-time paid internship in the summer of 2026.

At this time, we are considering PhD students who will be enrolled in an accredited degree program in the summer of 2026, slated to graduate no earlier than December 2026. Applicants must be legally authorized to work in Canada on a full-time basis during the 8 month internship. Visa sponsorship is not available for this position.

Please ensure that your graduation date is visible on your resume.