AI Intern: Rail Ops & LLM Prototyping

Progress Rail, A Caterpillar Company; La Grange (IL); On-site; USD 30,000 - 51,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

401(k) plan

Medical/Dental/Vision/Life

Paid Vacation

PTO

Education Assistance

Job summary

Progress Rail, A Caterpillar Company, seeks an AI Intern on the ART team in La Grange, IL to design and prototype AI strategies for rail logistics. You will build integrations that let LLMs reason over data, call tools, and generate auditable outputs for planners and operators.

You’ll collaborate with product, R&D, and data engineering to deliver experiments and pilot features that improve network velocity, asset utilization, and safety in an industrial setting.

Qualifications

• Hands-on experience with Python for data/ML and at least one ML/NLP library.
• Basic understanding of LLMs and how to evaluate them.
• Familiarity with REST APIs, JSON, and microservice integration.
• Strong problem-solving and clear written communication.

Responsibilities

• Prototype LLM-enabled workflows and build agents, prompts, and tool-use policies.
• Integrate LLM pipelines with schedulers, simulators, and rules engines.
• Package prototypes as services/notebooks with versioned prompts and tests.
• Collaborate with software, optimization, and R&D teams and demo progress.
• Apply data privacy, access controls, and safety guardrails; follow MLOps practices.

Skills

Python for data/ML

ML/NLP libraries

LLMs basics

REST APIs & JSON

Problem solving

Team collaboration

Education

Bachelor's or Master's in CS/DS/Engineering/OR/Applied Math

Coursework in ML, NLP, OR, algorithms, databases, data structures, probability, software engineering

Tools

PyTorch

TensorFlow

scikit-learn

Hugging Face

Docker

Git

Job description

Progress Rail, A Caterpillar Company, seeks an AI Intern on the ART team in La Grange, IL to design and prototype AI strategies for rail logistics. You will build integrations that let LLMs reason over data, call tools, and generate auditable outputs for planners and operators.

You’ll collaborate with product, R&D, and data engineering to deliver experiments and pilot features that improve network velocity, asset utilization, and safety in an industrial setting.