diff --git a/ci/docker/runtime_functions.sh b/ci/docker/runtime_functions.sh
index de1b7795ce69..128ae2babc35 100755
--- a/ci/docker/runtime_functions.sh
+++ b/ci/docker/runtime_functions.sh
@@ -1296,6 +1296,20 @@ nightly_scala_demo_test_cpu() {
     bash bin/run_im.sh
 }
 
+nightly_estimator_rnn_gpu() {
+    set -ex
+    cd /work/mxnet/tests/nightly/estimator
+    export PYTHONPATH=/work/mxnet/python/
+    python test_sentiment_rnn.py --type gpu
+}
+
+nightly_estimator_rnn_cpu() {
+    set -ex
+    cd /work/mxnet/tests/nightly/estimator
+    export PYTHONPATH=/work/mxnet/python/
+    python test_sentiment_rnn.py --type cpu
+}
+
 # Deploy
 
 deploy_docs() {
diff --git a/tests/nightly/Jenkinsfile b/tests/nightly/Jenkinsfile
index 758c86476f75..a65da2d0b87e 100755
--- a/tests/nightly/Jenkinsfile
+++ b/tests/nightly/Jenkinsfile
@@ -136,6 +136,22 @@ core_logic: {
           utils.docker_run('ubuntu_nightly_cpu', 'nightly_test_javascript', false)
         }
       }
+    },
+    'estimator: RNN GPU': {
+      node(NODE_LINUX_GPU) {
+        ws('workspace/estimator-test-rnn-gpu') {
+          utils.unpack_and_init('gpu', mx_lib)
+          utils.docker_run('ubuntu_nightly_gpu', 'nightly_estimator_test_rnn_gpu', true)
+        }
+      }
+    },
+    'estimator: RNN CPU': {
+      node(NODE_LINUX_CPU) {
+        ws('workspace/estimator-test-rnn-cpu') {
+          utils.unpack_and_init('cpu', mx_lib)
+          utils.docker_run('ubuntu_nightly_cpu', 'nightly_estimator_test_rnn_cpu', false)
+        }
+      }
     }
   }
 }
diff --git a/tests/nightly/estimator/test_sentiment_rnn.py b/tests/nightly/estimator/test_sentiment_rnn.py
new file mode 100644
index 000000000000..7e42831786ce
--- /dev/null
+++ b/tests/nightly/estimator/test_sentiment_rnn.py
@@ -0,0 +1,276 @@
+# Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one
+# or more contributor license agreements.  See the NOTICE file
+# distributed with this work for additional information
+# regarding copyright ownership.  The ASF licenses this file
+# to you under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the
+# "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance
+# with the License.  You may obtain a copy of the License at
+#
+#   http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
+#
+# Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing,
+# software distributed under the License is distributed on an
+# "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY
+# KIND, either express or implied.  See the License for the
+# specific language governing permissions and limitations
+# under the License.
+
+"""Gluon Text Sentiment Classification Example using RNN/CNN
+Example modified from below link:
+https://github.com/d2l-ai/d2l-en/blob/master/chapter_natural-language-processing/sentiment-analysis-rnn.md
+https://github.com/d2l-ai/d2l-en/blob/master/chapter_natural-language-processing/sentiment-analysis-cnn.md"""
+
+import argparse
+import os
+import tarfile
+import random
+import collections
+import mxnet as mx
+from mxnet import nd, gluon
+from mxnet.contrib import text
+from mxnet.gluon import nn, rnn
+from mxnet.gluon.estimator import estimator
+
+
+class TextCNN(nn.Block):
+    def __init__(self, vocab, embed_size, kernel_sizes, num_channels,
+                 **kwargs):
+        super(TextCNN, self).__init__(**kwargs)
+        self.embedding = nn.Embedding(len(vocab), embed_size)
+        # The embedding layer does not participate in training
+        self.constant_embedding = nn.Embedding(len(vocab), embed_size)
+        self.dropout = nn.Dropout(0.5)
+        self.decoder = nn.Dense(2)
+        # The max-over-time pooling layer has no weight, so it can share an
+        # instance
+        self.pool = nn.GlobalMaxPool1D()
+        # Create multiple one-dimensional convolutional layers
+        self.convs = nn.Sequential()
+        for c, k in zip(num_channels, kernel_sizes):
+            self.convs.add(nn.Conv1D(c, k, activation='relu'))
+
+    def forward(self, inputs):
+        # Concatenate the output of two embedding layers with shape of
+        # (batch size, number of words, word vector dimension) by word vector
+        embeddings = nd.concat(
+            self.embedding(inputs), self.constant_embedding(inputs), dim=2)
+        # According to the input format required by Conv1D, the word vector
+        # dimension, that is, the channel dimension of the one-dimensional
+        # convolutional layer, is transformed into the previous dimension
+        embeddings = embeddings.transpose((0, 2, 1))
+        # For each one-dimensional convolutional layer, after max-over-time
+        # pooling, an NDArray with the shape of (batch size, channel size, 1)
+        # can be obtained. Use the flatten function to remove the last
+        # dimension and then concatenate on the channel dimension
+        encoding = nd.concat(*[nd.flatten(
+            self.pool(conv(embeddings))) for conv in self.convs], dim=1)
+        # After applying the dropout method, use a fully connected layer to
+        # obtain the output
+        outputs = self.decoder(self.dropout(encoding))
+        return outputs
+
+
+class BiRNN(nn.Block):
+    def __init__(self, vocab, embed_size, num_hiddens, num_layers, **kwargs):
+        super(BiRNN, self).__init__(**kwargs)
+        self.embedding = nn.Embedding(len(vocab), embed_size)
+        # Set Bidirectional to True to get a bidirectional recurrent neural
+        # network
+        self.encoder = rnn.LSTM(num_hiddens, num_layers=num_layers,
+                                bidirectional=True, input_size=embed_size)
+        self.decoder = nn.Dense(2)
+
+    def forward(self, inputs):
+        # The shape of inputs is (batch size, number of words). Because LSTM
+        # needs to use sequence as the first dimension, the input is
+        # transformed and the word feature is then extracted. The output shape
+        # is (number of words, batch size, word vector dimension).
+        embeddings = self.embedding(inputs.T)
+        # The shape of states is (number of words, batch size, 2 * number of
+        # hidden units).
+        states = self.encoder(embeddings)
+        # Concatenate the hidden states of the initial time step and final
+        # time step to use as the input of the fully connected layer. Its
+        # shape is (batch size, 4 * number of hidden units)
+        encoding = nd.concat(states[0], states[-1])
+        outputs = self.decoder(encoding)
+        return outputs
+
+
+def download_imdb(data_dir='/tmp/data'):
+    '''
+    Download and extract the IMDB dataset
+    '''
+    url = ('http://ai.stanford.edu/~amaas/data/sentiment/aclImdb_v1.tar.gz')
+    sha1 = '01ada507287d82875905620988597833ad4e0903'
+    if not os.path.exists(data_dir):
+        os.makedirs(data_dir)
+    file_path = os.path.join(data_dir, 'aclImdb_v1.tar.gz')
+    if not os.path.isfile(file_path):
+        file_path = gluon.utils.download(url, data_dir, sha1_hash=sha1)
+    with tarfile.open(file_path, 'r') as f:
+        f.extractall(data_dir)
+
+
+def read_imdb(folder='train'):
+    '''
+    Read the IMDB dataset
+    '''
+    data = []
+    for label in ['pos', 'neg']:
+        folder_name = os.path.join('/tmp/data/aclImdb/', folder, label)
+        for file in os.listdir(folder_name):
+            with open(os.path.join(folder_name, file), 'rb') as f:
+                review = f.read().decode('utf-8').replace('\n', '').lower()
+                data.append([review, 1 if label == 'pos' else 0])
+    random.shuffle(data)
+    return data
+
+
+def get_tokenized_imdb(data):
+    '''
+    Tokenized the words
+    '''
+
+    def tokenizer(text):
+        return [tok.lower() for tok in text.split(' ')]
+
+    return [tokenizer(review) for review, _ in data]
+
+
+def get_vocab_imdb(data):
+    '''
+    Get the indexed tokens
+    '''
+    tokenized_data = get_tokenized_imdb(data)
+    counter = collections.Counter([tk for st in tokenized_data for tk in st])
+    return text.vocab.Vocabulary(counter, min_freq=5)
+
+
+def preprocess_imdb(data, vocab):
+    '''
+    Make the length of each comment 500 by truncating or adding 0s
+    '''
+    max_l = 500
+
+    def pad(x):
+        return x[:max_l] if len(x) > max_l else x + [0] * (max_l - len(x))
+
+    tokenized_data = get_tokenized_imdb(data)
+    features = nd.array([pad(vocab.to_indices(x)) for x in tokenized_data])
+    labels = nd.array([score for _, score in data])
+    return features, labels
+
+
+def run(net, train_dataloader, test_dataloader, **kwargs):
+    '''
+    Train a test sentiment model
+    '''
+    num_epochs = kwargs['epochs']
+    ctx = kwargs['ctx']
+    batch_size = kwargs['batch_size']
+    lr = kwargs['lr']
+
+    # Define trainer
+    trainer = mx.gluon.Trainer(net.collect_params(), 'adam', {'learning_rate': lr})
+    # Define loss and evaluation metrics
+    loss = gluon.loss.SoftmaxCrossEntropyLoss()
+    acc = mx.metric.Accuracy()
+
+    # Define estimator
+    est = estimator.Estimator(net=net, loss=loss, metrics=acc,
+                              trainers=trainer, context=ctx)
+    # Begin training
+    est.fit(train_data=train_dataloader, val_data=test_dataloader,
+            epochs=num_epochs, batch_size=batch_size)
+    return est
+
+
+def test_estimator_cpu(**kwargs):
+    '''
+    Test estimator by doing one pass over each model with synthetic data
+    '''
+    models = ['TextCNN', 'BiRNN']
+    ctx = kwargs['ctx']
+    batch_size = kwargs['batch_size']
+    embed_size = kwargs['embed_size']
+
+    train_data = mx.nd.random.randint(low=0, high=100, shape=(2 * batch_size, 500))
+    train_label = mx.nd.random.randint(low=0, high=2, shape=(2 * batch_size,))
+    val_data = mx.nd.random.randint(low=0, high=100, shape=(batch_size, 500))
+    val_label = mx.nd.random.randint(low=0, high=2, shape=(batch_size,))
+
+    train_dataloader = gluon.data.DataLoader(dataset=gluon.data.ArrayDataset(train_data, train_label),
+                                             batch_size=batch_size, shuffle=True)
+    val_dataloader = gluon.data.DataLoader(dataset=gluon.data.ArrayDataset(val_data, val_label),
+                                           batch_size=batch_size)
+    vocab_list = mx.nd.zeros(shape=(100,))
+
+    # Get the model
+    for model in models:
+        if model == 'TextCNN':
+            kernel_sizes, nums_channels = [3, 4, 5], [100, 100, 100]
+            net = TextCNN(vocab_list, embed_size, kernel_sizes, nums_channels)
+        else:
+            num_hiddens, num_layers = 100, 2
+            net = BiRNN(vocab_list, embed_size, num_hiddens, num_layers)
+        net.initialize(mx.init.Xavier(), ctx=ctx)
+
+        run(net, train_dataloader, val_dataloader, **kwargs)
+
+
+def test_estimator_gpu(**kwargs):
+    '''
+    Test estimator by training Bidirectional RNN for 5 epochs on the IMDB dataset
+    and verify accuracy
+    '''
+    ctx = kwargs['ctx']
+    batch_size = kwargs['batch_size']
+    num_epochs = kwargs['epochs']
+    embed_size = kwargs['embed_size']
+
+    # data
+    download_imdb()
+    train_data, test_data = read_imdb('train'), read_imdb('test')
+    vocab = get_vocab_imdb(train_data)
+
+    train_set = gluon.data.ArrayDataset(*preprocess_imdb(train_data, vocab))
+    test_set = gluon.data.ArrayDataset(*preprocess_imdb(test_data, vocab))
+    train_dataloader = gluon.data.DataLoader(train_set, batch_size, shuffle=True)
+    test_dataloader = gluon.data.DataLoader(test_set, batch_size)
+
+    # Model
+    num_hiddens, num_layers = 100, 2
+    net = BiRNN(vocab, embed_size, num_hiddens, num_layers)
+    net.initialize(mx.init.Xavier(), ctx=ctx)
+
+    glove_embedding = text.embedding.create(
+        'glove', pretrained_file_name='glove.6B.100d.txt', vocabulary=vocab)
+
+    net.embedding.weight.set_data(glove_embedding.idx_to_vec)
+    net.embedding.collect_params().setattr('grad_req', 'null')
+
+    est = run(net, train_dataloader, test_dataloader, **kwargs)
+
+    assert est.train_stats['train_accuracy'][num_epochs - 1] > 0.70
+
+
+parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description='test gluon estimator')
+parser.add_argument('--type', type=str, default='cpu')
+opt = parser.parse_args()
+kwargs = {
+    'batch_size': 64,
+    'lr': 0.01,
+    'embed_size': 100
+}
+
+if opt.type == 'cpu':
+    kwargs['ctx'] = mx.cpu()
+    kwargs['epochs'] = 1
+    test_estimator_cpu(**kwargs)
+elif opt.type == 'gpu':
+    kwargs['ctx'] = mx.gpu()
+    kwargs['epochs'] = 5
+    test_estimator_gpu(**kwargs)
+else:
+    raise RuntimeError("Unknown test type")