AI Engineering Intern, Voice & LLM Systems
About The Position
About Presto Phoenix, Inc. Presto is the leading Voice AI company for restaurant drive-thrus, operating at scale in complex, noisy, customer-facing environments. As the AI partner to more than a dozen of the most iconic American restaurant brands, Presto is building one of the most impactful real-world applications of AI, directly improving revenue, labor efficiency, and guest experience for millions of people. Founded by alumni from MIT, the University of Waterloo and University of Illinois, Presto is built on a deeply technical, entrepreneurial engineering culture. We place a premium on ownership, speed, and first principles thinking, empowering engineers to move quickly, experiment boldly, and solve hard, real-world problems. AI is not a feature at Presto, it is the foundation of how we build, evaluate, and evolve our products. We are backed by Remus Capital, were a Y Combinator company, and are headquartered in Silicon Valley. This may not be the right fit if you're looking for a passive, low-ownership internship. We move at the pace of AI. Presto is for builders, experimenters, and problem-solvers who thrive in ambiguity and are excited to work on real-world AI systems alongside a high-performance team. The Role We are looking for AI Engineering Interns to contribute to the core intelligence behind Presto's Voice AI platform. This is a hands-on technical internship at the intersection of large language models, real-time systems, and production AI. You will work on systems that power live customer interactions across thousands of restaurant locations, where performance, latency, and reliability matter. You'll gain direct exposure to the full AI development lifecycle, from prototyping new capabilities to supporting production deployments.
Requirements
- Currently pursuing a bachelor's or master's degree in computer science, AI, machine learning, or a related field.
- Strong programming fundamentals in Python.
- Coursework or project experience in machine learning, NLP, or AI systems.
- Familiarity with ML frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow.
- Curiosity, adaptability, and a strong desire to learn in a fast-moving environment.
- Ability to manage priorities and communicate technical ideas clearly.
Nice To Haves
- Hands-on experience with LLM APIs or building AI-powered applications (coursework, personal projects, or research).
- Exposure to cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure.
- Experience with real-time, low-latency, or voice/conversational systems.
- Familiarity with data pipelines or working with large, messy datasets.
Responsibilities
- Assist in building and improving AI/ML components used in real-time voice interactions.
- Experiment with LLM-based systems, including prompt design, workflow iteration, and behavioral testing.
- Help clean, structure, and filter real-world datasets to improve model performance and evaluation quality.
- Contribute to fast iteration cycles, ramping quickly on existing codebases and delivering with minimal oversight.
- Collaborate with engineering, product, and AI teams to translate real-world problems into practical solutions.
- Stay current with the latest advancements in AI, LLMs, and applied machine learning.
Benefits
- competitive internship compensation commensurate with experience and location
- hands-on mentorship
- exposure to a high-performance AI team
- opportunity to convert to a full-time role based on performance
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What This Job Offers
Career Level
Intern
Education Level
No Education Listed
