AI Engineering & Operations Intern

About Fuel Cycle:

Fuel Cycle empowers leading organizations with agile research solutions that deliver decision-ready insights fast flexible and fully integrated. As a market research disruptor our AI-powered Insights Platform is built for speed precision and scale. With cutting-edge tools and seamless audience connectivity we help brands ditch the guesswork and make smarter customer-led decisions at lightning speed.

Why work at Fuel Cycle

Join a high-growth team where curiosity is valued ownership is encouraged and your work drives real-world impact. Whether youre based at our Los Angeles HQ New York City hub working remotely across the U.S. or part of our global team in India youll help shape the future of decision intelligence for some of the worlds most iconic brands.

Overview:

The AI Engineering & Operations Intern is responsible for building integrating and optimizing AI-powered tools and workflows that improve business operations and accelerate decision-making. This role is ideal for someone who is passionate about large language models prompt engineering and the practical deployment of AI systems. Working closely with our Product Engineering and Operations teams the intern will help design and ship AI solutionsfrom prompt design and API integration to monitoring and evaluationcontributing to high-impact internal initiatives.

Location: Los Angeles CA

Work Arrangement: This is an onsite role requiring 3 days per week in the office.

Key Responsibilities:

AI Engineering & Integration

• Design build and iterate on AI-powered features and internal tools using LLM APIs (e.g. OpenAI Anthropic HuggingFace) to improve operational efficiency.

• Develop and refine prompts chains and agents to automate repeatable tasks and augment decision-making workflows.

• Translate business requirements into AI-powered solutions selecting appropriate models tools and integration patterns.

Collaboration & Execution

• Work alongside Product Managers Engineers and Business Stakeholders to identify high-value opportunities for AI automation and tooling.

• Contribute to internal documentation runbooks and stakeholder demos that communicate AI system behavior and outputs clearly.

Quality Assurance

• Design and execute evaluation frameworks (evals) to measure AI output quality accuracy and alignment with business requirements.

• Monitor deployed AI features for performance drift and edge cases; iterate on prompts and configurations to improve reliability and safety.

Your Success Metrics:

• Successful delivery of AI-powered tools or integrations that demonstrably improve team efficiency or automation coverage.

• Demonstrated ability to evaluate AI outputs rigorously and iterate based on qualitative and quantitative feedback.

• Effective cross-functional collaboration that accelerates AI adoption and ensures solutions are practical and well-documented.

• Positive feedback from cross-functional stakeholders on clarity execution and results of delivered solutions.

Who youll work with:

• Product Managers

• R&D

• Operations Leads

• Finance

Core Skills & Competencies:

• LLM APIs & Prompt Engineering: Hands-on experience (or strong academic exposure) with LLM APIs such as OpenAI Anthropic Claude or HuggingFace; familiarity with prompt design few-shot techniques and chaining.

• AI Systems Thinking: Curious and methodical thinker who understands how AI components (models retrievers evals guardrails) fit together to produce reliable business-ready outcomes.

• Communication: Able to explain AI system behavior limitations and tradeoffs to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• Evaluation & Iteration: Comfortable designing test cases and evals to assess AI output quality and iterating quickly on prompts or architecture based on results.

• Project Management: Organized and able to manage multiple AI workstreams simultaneously balancing speed of experimentation with documentation and quality standards.

What youll bring:

• Education: Currently pursuing or recently completed a Bachelors or Masters degree in Computer Science AI/ML Software Engineering Information Systems or a related field.

• Experience: Previous internship coursework or project work involving LLMs AI application development or AI/ML APIs.

• Mindset: Self-starter with a growth mindset eager to learn and contribute.

• Technical Aptitude: Comfortable writing Python; familiarity with REST APIs JSON and at least one LLM SDK or framework (e.g. LangChain LlamaIndex OpenAI SDK).

• Collaboration: A team-oriented attitude and willingness to receive and act on feedback.

Preferred but Not Required:

• Experience with RAG pipelines vector databases (e.g. Pinecone Weaviate pgvector) or semantic search

• Familiarity with AI observability or evaluation tooling (e.g. LangSmith Braintrust Weights & Biases)

• Exposure to agentic frameworks (e.g. LangGraph AutoGen CrewAI) or multi-modal AI applications

Benefits & Perks:

Fuel Cycle is committed to supporting the well-being flexibility and growth of our team. We offer a competitive and inclusive benefits package that includes:

• Weekly community lunches refreshments and snacks at our LA & NY headquarters

• Pet-friendly office environments

Compensation Overview:

The expected hourly pay for this position is $18.50/hr. Your final base salary will be determined based on a variety of factors including location work experience skills knowledge education and certifications.

Commitment to Diversity Equity and Equal Opportunity:

At Fuel Cycle we embrace the values of diversity equity and inclusion and are committed to fostering an inclusive company culture. We believe that everyone regardless of their background or identity should have equal access to opportunities for growth and advancement. Our selection processes and career pathways are designed to be fair transparent and free from bias. We value the unique perspectives and contributions of each team member knowing that this diverse range of experiences strengthens our team. Fuel Cycle stands firmly against discrimination based on disability sex race gender identity sexual orientation religion national origin age veteran status or any other protected status under the law.

Fuel Cycle is an equal opportunity employer and fully comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). We will provide reasonable accommodations for qualified applicants and employees with disabilities as needed to enable them to perform the essential functions of their job and participate in the application and interview process. If you require accommodations during any part of the application process please contact us at to discuss your needs.

Required Experience:

Intern