Research & Product Engineering Intern - AI Systems

Pioneer Research Group; Irvine (CA); On-site; USD 2,755,000 - 4,133,000; Part time

Job summary

Pioneer Research Group is seeking a part-time Research & Product Engineering Intern—AI Systems in Irvine, CA. You will work directly with the CTO on research, quality assurance, and planning for an AI-driven clinical research platform.

This is an in-person intern role with a path to a full-time offer. Ideal candidates have a strong CS/Math background, Python proficiency, experience with TypeScript or Swift, SQL, and hands-on work with LLMs and retrieval systems.

Qualifications

• Strong Python programming
• Working fluency in TypeScript or Swift
• Comfortable with SQL and data joins
• Hands-on with LLMs and retrieval systems
• Experimental discipline with proper splits and baselines
• Ability to read and digest research papers

Responsibilities

• Work with CTO on research questions, hypotheses, stop rules, experiments and evaluation
• Test and verify AI production components; document reproducible findings and feed improvements
• Map end-to-end workflows, identify gaps, and propose next features or experiments

Skills

Python

TypeScript/Swift

SQL

LLMs & retrieval

Experimentation discipline

Reading papers

Product sense

Tools

Git

CI

Job description

Research & Product Engineering Intern — AI Systems Irvine, CA · In person · Paid · Part time during the school year or full time, with a path to a full-time offer

Small Irvine team building production AI for clinical research. You'll work directly with the CTO on three things: Research: take a defined question, write the hypothesis and stop rule, build the experiment, evaluate it against a public baseline, and ship what works. Quality: use our app and our AI system the way the team does, break them, file reproducible findings, and verify the fixes. Your findings go straight into the engineering queue. Planning: walk a workflow or a screen end to end, write up what's missing or wrong, and propose what we should build next.

What you bring

A strong background in computer science, statistics, applied math, biomedical informatics or a related field. Current students, recent graduates and builders with real work to show are all welcome; graduate students and anyone with a first-author paper, thesis or notable open-source work are especially welcome. Strong Python: clean, tested code, not notebooks that only run once. Working fluency in TypeScript or Swift, and the ability to pick up the other. Comfortable in SQL: joins, window functions, and knowing what a query really returns on messy data. Hands-on with LLMs and retrieval: prompting, embeddings, vector and hybrid search, judge models or fine-tuning, and the failure modes of each. Experimental discipline: proper splits, leakage checks, a cited baseline, confidence intervals, and a written hypothesis and stop rule before you start. Git, code review and CI are second nature; you've shipped something other people depend on. You can read a paper on Monday afternoon and have a working prototype by Wednesday morning. An eye for product: you notice when software is slow, confusing or wrong, and you can say exactly why. Nice to have: time-series or event data, speech or audio, healthcare data, or an ML systems paper. You care about the mission: patients in better trials, evidence that saves lives.

What you get

Direct mentorship from the CTO, your own machine and compute, and work that ships to a real production system the week it's done.

Location Irvine office, in person. Please be local or able to commute.