Software Engineering Intern

Mechanize; Oakland, San Francisco (CA, CA); On-site; USD 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

401k

Health insurance

Dental

Vision

Life insurance

Job summary

Mechanize is building reinforcement learning environments to test and improve coding models. You will design, build, and refine RL tasks, owning the full lifecycle from concept to automated grading.

You should be a strong Python coder who can work independently, motivated by problems requiring technical skill and creative cleverness, and graduating in 2026 or 2027. No prior ML/AI experience is required for this role.

Qualifications

• Can code in Python.
• Strong technical fundamentals and AI model intuition.
• No prior ML/AI experience required.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and refine RL tasks and environments.
• Own the full lifecycle from idea to grading infrastructure.
• Evaluate model outputs, analyze failures, and iterate for rigor and fairness.
• Direct coding agents, assess performance, and identify subtle issues.

Skills

Python

Independent work

Problem solving

Creative thinking

No ML/AI experience required

Education

Graduating in 2026 or 2027

Job description

About Mechanize

Mechanize builds reinforcement learning environments that frontier AI labs use to train and evaluate their coding models. Learn more at mechanize.work.

Why the work matters

AI models have gotten good at narrow coding tasks but still fail at the complex, judgment-heavy parts of software engineering. We build the environments that expose those failures and help models improve.

What you'll do

You'll design, build, and refine RL tasks. Each task is a self-contained software engineering challenge with a prompt, an environment, and an automated grader. You own the full lifecycle: coming up with the idea, implementing the grading infrastructure, running frontier models against the task, analyzing where and why they fail, and iterating until the task is rigorous and fair.

Coming up with good task ideas requires being clever: finding situations where a frontier model will fail in interesting ways, which means seeing gaps that the model itself doesn't see. You will use coding agents heavily, and a large part of the job is directing them well, evaluating their output, and knowing when they are failing in subtle ways.

What makes someone good at this

Strong technical fundamentals combined with an intuition for AI model behavior. You need to anticipate where a model will take shortcuts, distinguish genuine capability gaps from grader issues, and understand how a model will interpret a prompt. Most engineers significantly underestimate what frontier coding agents can already do; candidates who have spent significant time working with them will have a real head start.

Good fit if you:

• Are graduating in 2026 or 2027

• Can code in Python

• Are confident working independently

• Are motivated by problems that require both technical skill and creative cleverness

• No prior ML or AI experience required

Probably not a good fit if you:

• Want a product engineering role building features for end users

• Prefer a highly collaborative team environment with shared ownership

• Want extensive structured mentorship

This is independent, high-ownership work. You own your tasks from start to finish, with regular check-ins and feedback. Strong performers are recognized and promoted quickly. Benefits include 401k, health, dental, vision, and life insurance. Applying takes less than one minute.

Interview process: how-our-interview-process-works

Learn more about the work: what-working-here-is-like

About Mechanize. ~20 person team in San Francisco. Backed by Patrick Collison, Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, Jeff Dean, Dwarkesh Patel, and Sholto Douglas. Featured in the New York Times, the Dwarkesh Podcast and Hard Fork.