AI Engineer Intern

Pioneering Minds AI is a nonprofit organization focused on empowering AI-Native Pioneers—professionals, founders, and scholars—who build, deploy, and govern AI that compounds human opportunity responsibly. As one of the most active founders communities in NYC, we host an array of events ranging from workshops, hackathons, demo days to AI mixers, bringing together AI pioneers from all domains together.

In the era of co-existence with AI, PMAI is looking for the AI pioneers who not only embraces the technology but is enthusiastic about using it responsibly and making it accessible to all. Together, we can prepare humanity for the era of AI.

Title: AI Engineer Intern, Frontier Prototyping

Location: New York City (in-person/hybrid; remote considered for exceptional fit)

Commitment: Minimum 10–15 hours per week

Ideal Candidate: A university student who codes for fun, ships quickly, and wants to learn how real teams turn LLMs into reliable products for community, events, and research programs.

• Design and implement small but complete AI features for PMAI’s platform and events (e.g., speaker–attendee matching, knowledge search over past talks, automated event recaps, FAQ copilots).
• Integrate LLM APIs and open-source models; wire up retrieval (RAG), simple tools/agents, and evaluation harnesses to measure quality, latency, and cost.
• Build minimal UIs or CLI utilities so demos are usable by non-engineers; deploy to a lightweight hosting environment.
• Instrument everything: add logging, prompt/version tracking, and guardrails; write short tests and smoke checks so features don’t regress on demo day.
• Collaborate with community leads to translate ambiguous requests into scoped, shippable tasks; present weekly progress with live demos.
• Support event workflows: ingest talk transcripts and slides, generate highlights/summaries, tag content for search, and automate newsletter snippets.
• Contribute to internal docs and playbooks so future volunteers and fellows can extend your work.

• Build for real users: your features will be used by founders, researchers, and operators at NYC events, demo days, and workshops.
• High-ownership projects: you’ll spec, implement, and ship end-to-end with fast feedback from community stakeholders.
• Portfolio outcomes: ship production-adjacent micro-products, earn public recognition on PMAI materials, and receive detailed recommendation letters.
• Mentorship: work with experienced engineers and community leaders on design reviews, evaluation strategies, and responsible-use practices.
• Access: attend invite-only sessions (e.g., founder dinners, demo days, AI Hot 100 Summit) to meet builders and investors.
• Flexibility: hours that fit a student schedule; hybrid and remote options when feasible.

• University student (undergrad or grad), ideally NYC-based.
• Comfortable with AI-assisted coding with CC, Codex, GCLI and equivalent.
• Familiar with basic prompt engineering and aware of evaluation pitfalls (hallucinations, prompt drift, latency/cost tradeoffs).
• Organized, curious, and proactive—able to turn vague goals into small, testable milestones.
• Strong communicator who can explain decisions to non-technical teammates.
• Bonus points for any of the following (nice-to-haves, not gatekeepers):
• Experience with vector databases (pgvector, Pinecone, Weaviate) and retrieval patterns.
• Simple web app deployment (Vercel, Render, Fly.io, or a tiny VM).
• Libraries like FastAPI/Flask, Next.js, LangChain/LlamaIndex (or framework-free discipline).
• Basic evaluation tooling (promptfoo, Ragas, DeepEval) or experiment tracking.
• Interest in safety/ethics, red-teaming, or content moderation guardrails.