AI Engineering Intern

Skillify; Las Vegas (NV); On-site; USD 20,000 - 27,000; Full time

Job summary

Skillify in Las Vegas, NV is offering a hands-on AI Engineering Intern role to build and evaluate AI agents powering Kinship Labs. This 3-month, in-person internship is designed for students and recent grads aiming to ship LLM features at a real startup.

You'll work with senior engineers on prompt engineering, model integration, and evaluation frameworks, with daily mentorship, access to Claude/OpenAI tools, and opportunities to transition to a full-time role based on performance.

Qualifications

• Currently enrolled in or recently completed a master's in CS, data science, or related field.
• Coursework in NLP, machine learning, or AI.
• Familiarity with Python or JavaScript.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.
• Nice to have: prompt engineering or building LLM-powered applications.
• Nice to have: familiarity with evaluation frameworks (e.g., evals).
• Nice to have: embeddings, RAG architectures, or vector databases.

Responsibilities

• Engineer and iterate on system prompts to improve AI agent response quality.
• Design context window strategies for multi-turn conversations.
• Optimize prompts for coaching, follow-ups, scheduling, and FAQs.
• Document prompt strategies and build a library of effective patterns.
• Experiment with models (Claude, GPT-5) for various tasks.
• Design and execute evaluation frameworks to measure AI performance.
• Analyze AI agent conversations to identify failure modes.
• Build automated testing pipelines for prompt regression testing.
• Apply NLP to assess conversation quality, tone, and sentiment.
• Create benchmarks and dashboards to track AI performance.
• Assist in building new AI-powered features.
• Integrate LLM APIs into production systems.
• Prototype new AI capabilities and present findings.

Skills

Prompt engineering

NLP knowledge

Communication skills

Python

JavaScript

Education

Master's in CS / Data Science or related

Exceptional Bachelor's considered

Tools

Git & GitHub

Node.js

PostgreSQL

Prisma ORM

Supabase

Job description

# AI Engineering InternInternshipLas Vegas, NV3 months · $2,080/moMon-Fri, 9-5 (40 hrs/wk)In-personA hands-on role for someone who wants to engineer production prompts, evaluate AI agents rigorously, and ship LLM features at a real startup.We're a small team building two products. **Skillify** runs career workshops and mentorship programs for students - we've reached thousands of students across 220+ schools. **Kinship Labs** is the AI-powered relationship management platform that powers Skillify and helps other organizations maintain personalized, human connections at scale across SMS and email. The AI agents you'll work on power both.You'll work directly with the engineering and product teams to build, optimize, and evaluate the AI agents at the heart of our platforms. This is hands-on work - prompt engineering, LLM integration, conversation analysis, and building evaluation frameworks to make sure our AI systems perform reliably at scale.**Work environment:** full-time office setting with a small, collaborative team. You'll have a dedicated workstation, access to professional AI tooling (Claude, OpenAI, etc.), and direct mentorship from senior engineers.## What you'll actually doPrompt engineering & optimization (50%)* Engineer and iterate on system prompts to improve AI agent response quality* Design context window strategies for multi-turn conversations* Optimize prompts for specific use cases: coaching, follow-ups, scheduling, FAQs* Document prompt strategies and build a library of effective patterns* Experiment with different models (Claude, GPT-5, etc.) for various tasksAI evaluation & testing (35%)* Design and execute evaluation frameworks (evals) to measure AI performance* Analyze AI agent conversations to identify failure modes and areas for improvement* Build automated testing pipelines for prompt regression testing* Apply NLP techniques to assess conversation quality, tone, and sentiment* Create benchmarks and dashboards to track AI performance over timeAI feature development (15%)* Assist in building new AI-powered features (summarization, classification, extraction)* Integrate LLM APIs into production systems* Prototype new AI capabilities and present findings to the team## What you'll learnBy the end of this internship, you'll be able to:* **Engineer production prompts** - design, test, and iterate on prompts that perform reliably across diverse inputs and edge cases* **Evaluate AI systems rigorously** - build systematic evaluation frameworks to measure LLM performance on real-world tasks* **Apply NLP in production** - translate academic NLP knowledge into practical conversation analysis and quality assessment* **Optimize for cost and latency** - make informed tradeoffs between model capability, response time, and API costs* **Use modern development workflows** - Git/GitHub, code review, CI/CD, and collaborative software development* **Communicate technical findings** - present AI performance insights and recommendations to non-technical stakeholders## What we're looking forRequired* Currently enrolled in or recently completed a Master's program in Computer Science, Data Science, or related field (exceptional Bachelor's candidates considered)* Coursework in NLP, machine learning, or AI* Familiarity with Python or JavaScript programming* Strong written and verbal communication skillsNice to have* Experience with prompt engineering or building LLM-powered applications* Familiarity with evaluation frameworks (e.g., RAGAS, custom evals)* Understanding of embeddings, RAG architectures, or vector databases* Experience with Git and GitHub* Personal projects, research, or coursework involving LLMs or conversational AI## Tech you'll work with* **AI APIs:** Claude API (Anthropic), OpenAI API* **Languages:** Python, JavaScript, SQL* **Backend:** Node.js, Express, Prisma ORM* **Database:** PostgreSQL via Supabase* **Version control:** Git/GitHub* **Communication:** Slack## Mentorship & path to full-timeYou'll get daily check-ins with progress review, weekly 1:1 mentorship sessions, direct access to senior engineers and our CTO for technical guidance, and code review on all your work.This internship is designed with a potential transition to a full-time role in mind. At the end of the 3-month program, strong performers may be offered a full-time position as a Data Scientist or AI Engineer. Final hiring depends on mutual fit, business needs, and available funding at the time of evaluation.If you read this and thought "I was literally born for this" - we want to hear from you.