AI & ML Engineering Intern

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About Zello

Zello is a voice-first communication platform, powered by our industry-leading push-to-talk technology, to improve collaboration and productivity for desk-less workers. With over 175+ million users, we’re the #1 rated push-to-talk app in the world, delivering 9 billion (yes, with a B) messages a month. 

At Zello, our company values are at the heart of what we do everyday. We’re proud to serve the frontline, we’re privileged to connect people in times of crisis across the globe, and we’re honored to support first responders.

And this is where you come in.

Zello's Data & AI team has shipped customer-facing AI features (Ella assistant, AI Insights, message summaries, AI-powered search) and is now building the internal AI layer that makes every team at the company faster and sharper. We need an engineering intern who can take real operational problems — support triage bottlenecks, manual data workflows, scattered internal knowledge — and turn them into working AI-powered tools. This is a hands-on building role, not a research or observation internship.

The Role

You'll report to the Head of Data & AI and work alongside the AI engineering team building internal productivity tools powered by LLMs, embeddings, and automation. The right person for this role is someone who has already built things with LLMs on their own — not because someone assigned it, but because they were curious and wanted to see it work. You'll have real autonomy, real users, and real impact from week one.

After a Successful Internship, You Will Have:

• Shipped at least two internal AI tools that Zello teams rely on weekly — whether that's an automated triage agent, a CRM enrichment pipeline, an LLM-powered Slack workflow, or something we haven't thought of yet

• Contributed meaningful improvements to Zello's AI platform infrastructure — embeddings pipelines, RAG systems, evaluation frameworks, or reusable components the team builds on after you leave

• Measurably reduced manual effort in at least one operational workflow, with a clear before/after comparison you can point to

• Documented everything to a standard where another engineer can pick it up and maintain it without calling you

What You'll Do

• Design and build internal AI-powered tools using LLM APIs (Claude, OpenAI), ML frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow), and AI-assisted development tools against Zello's data stack (Snowflake, dbt)

• Identify automation opportunities by shadowing internal teams (support, ops, sales) and understanding their real pain points

• Prototype quickly, ship working v1s, collect feedback from actual users, and iterate

• Contribute to shared AI infrastructure — prompt template libraries, evaluation harnesses, RAG pipeline components, data connectors

• Communicate technical ideas clearly, grounded in robust scientific and engineering principles

• Present your work and impact to the broader team

Who You Are

• You're currently pursuing or have recently completed a degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Machine Learning, or a related technical field at a top-tier program, with a strong academic record

• You've already built at least one working application using an LLM API — a hackathon project, a personal tool, coursework that produced real software. You didn't just follow a tutorial; you scoped a problem and shipped something

• You understand Python and SQL deeply enough to reason about code structure, debug issues, and direct AI-assisted development tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot) to produce high-quality output

• You have familiarity with ML frameworks like PyTorch or TensorFlow — you understand model architectures and can work with existing models, not just API wrappers

• You understand how embeddings, vector search, and retrieval-augmented generation work — even if you haven't deployed them at scale

• You're the kind of person who sees a manual process and instinctively thinks about how to automate it

• You scope your own work. Given a loosely defined problem, you ask good questions early, propose an approach, and then run with it

We hire for potential, passion for our mission, and a knack for solving difficult problems over checking every qualification box. We have competitive pay, equity with significant upside, and intentionally design our benefits to encourage healthy and well-balanced employees, flexible schedules and time off. We even offer a sabbatical after every five years of service so you’re able to pursue and enjoy what matters most to you. And of course, we wouldn’t be a technology company without a ping-pong table and free snacks in our break room. Join us!

Zello provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.

All Zello personnel are required to comply with defined security, privacy, and compliance requirements applicable to their role along with requirements that are applicable to all Zello personnel.