Agent Engineering Intern

Cheiron • Los Altos, CA

5h • Onsite

About The Position

We're looking for an Agent Engineering Intern to build new agent-driven workflows inside Cheiron's product. Cheiron's agents do more than generate an answer. They break complex objectives into steps, retrieve evidence, call tools, maintain state across long-running work, recover from failures, and produce structured results that a person can review and trust. You will own a bounded workflow and help take it from an ambiguous problem to a reliable, working product. This is an Applied Engineering Role. We care about strong software fundamentals, hands-on ownership, and evidence that you have built nontrivial systems yourself. The role is best suited to undergraduate and master's students who are already serious builders.

Requirements

• Currently pursuing an undergraduate or master's degree in computer science, computer engineering, or a related technical field.
• Strong programming fundamentals and experience building a substantial software project, developer tool, backend system, or open-source contribution.
• Hands-on experience building a nontrivial agent, retrieval system, tool-using workflow, evaluation harness, or multi-step automation system.
• Clear personal ownership of the work: you can explain what you implemented, the decisions you made, and what you would improve.
• Ability to reason about state, failure modes, grounding, evaluation, and engineering tradeoffs—not only prompts and model selection.
• High agency and comfort working through ambiguous problems in a fast-moving environment.
• Ability to work fully in person in Los Altos.
• Semester or quarter interns must commit at least 20 hours per week; summer interns should be available full time.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with Python, FastAPI, Postgres, agent frameworks, retrieval systems, or vector databases.
• Backend, distributed-systems, infrastructure, data-pipeline, or end-to-end product experience.
• Experience with tests, deployment, observability, security, or reliable failure handling.
• Experience building systems involving citations, provenance, human review, or other high-stakes correctness requirements.
• Strong open-source work, prior software-engineering internships, or an independently shipped product with real users.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement new agent workflows with explicit state, task decomposition, tool use, and typed outputs.
• Build retrieval and citation paths that ground important outputs in source evidence.
• Add evaluation, tracing, retries, observability, and recovery behavior for multi-step execution.
• Build the backend services, data models, APIs, and focused product surfaces required to make the workflow useful.
• Test agent behavior against realistic success cases, failure cases, and incomplete evidence.
• Work directly with engineers and domain experts, demonstrate progress frequently, and make pragmatic scope decisions.

Benefits

• Compensation $35–$55 per hour.
• Relocation assistance may be offered selectively to a strong candidate and is not guaranteed.
• Candidates of any nationality or visa status may be considered when the internship can be employed legally.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Part-time
• Career Level: Intern
• Education Level: Associate degree