Agent Engineering Intern

Cheiron; Los Altos (CA); Hybrid; USD 48,000 - 76,000; Part time

Job summary

Cheiron in Los Altos, CA is seeking an Agent Engineering Intern to build agent-driven workflows inside Cheiron's product. You will design bounded workflows, enable stateful task decomposition, and ground outputs with source evidence.

This hands-on internship is ideal for undergraduates or master's students who love building nontrivial systems, own their work, and can work in person at least 20 hours per week.

Qualifications

• 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.

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.

Skills

Strong programming fundamentals

Agent workflows

State management

Ownership & accountability

Education

Undergraduate or Master's degree in CS/related field

Tools

Python

FastAPI

Postgres

agent frameworks

retrieval systems

vector databases

Job description

Los Altos, CA · Engineering · Internship · Semester/quarter or summer · Fully in-person

Company Overview

In July 2026, Cheiron announced an $8 million seed round led by Menlo Ventures, bringing total funding to $13 million to date, with the backing and strategic support of industry veterans including Moderna co-founder and MIT Institute Professor Robert Langer, former Pfizer Chief Medical Officer Freda Lewis-Hall, Chai Discovery co-founder and CEO Josh Meier, former Starbucks CEO Laxman Narasimhan, and former Apple AI chief John Giannandrea.

Cheiron is building the first AI-native operating system designed to represent an entire drug program as a single connected system. The company's platform helps biopharma teams represent, reason over, and stress-test the full state of a drug development program, including the claims, evidence, assumptions, risks, decisions, and commitments that determine whether a therapy advances. In less than six months since launch, Cheiron has been adopted by tens of thousands of biopharma professionals and deployed by major drug developers, and is already used by 7 of Korea's top 10 biopharma companies.

Cheiron is expanding into pharmaceutical CMC (Chemistry, Manufacturing, and Controls) teams. CMC governs how a drug is made, tested, and kept consistent across its entire commercial life. The work involves hundreds of regulatory commitments, post-approval changes, and cross-market submissions. Today it runs on documents, spreadsheets, and institutional memory. Cheiron augments manual workflows with a CMC regulatory-specific intelligence and reasoning layer.

Founded in 2024 by Stanford-trained AI researchers. The team includes leaders with combined decades of experience across pharma and biotech. Headquartered in Los Altos, California. We are building and deploying the product now with rapid expansion into global markets.

About the Role

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.

What You'll Do

• 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.

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 Have

• 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.

Compensation

$35–$55 per hour. Exact compensation within the range depends on demonstrated expertise, relevant experience, and the time the student can commit.

Location, Relocation & Visa

This role is fully in person in Los Altos, CA. Academic-term interns must be able to work from the office at least 20 hours per week; summer interns should expect a full-time commitment. 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.

Interview Process

Semester/quarter route:

• 30-minute introductory call → one-day onsite in Los Altos → decision.

Summer route:

• 15-minute introductory call → take-home assignment → take-home interview → interview with Backend Team → decision.

• For some summer candidates, the final two interviews may instead be combined into a one-day onsite in Los Altos.

Equal Opportunity & Accommodation

Cheiron is an equal-opportunity employer. We consider all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.