About Fuel Cycle:
Fuel Cycle empowers leading organizations with agile research solutions that deliver decision-ready insights — fast, flexible, and fully integrated. As a market research disruptor, our AI-powered Insights Platform is built for speed, precision, and scale. With cutting-edge tools and seamless audience connectivity, we help brands ditch the guesswork and make smarter, customer-led decisions at lightning speed.
Why work at Fuel Cycle?
Join a high-growth team where curiosity is valued, ownership is encouraged, and your work drives real-world impact. Whether you’re based at our Los Angeles HQ, New York City hub, working remotely across the U.S., or part of our global team in India, you’ll help shape the future of decision intelligence for some of the world’s most iconic brands.
Overview:
The AI Engineering & Operations Intern is responsible for building, integrating, and optimizing AI-powered tools and workflows that improve business operations and accelerate decision-making. This role is ideal for someone who is passionate about large language models, prompt engineering, and the practical deployment of AI systems. Working closely with our Product, Engineering, and Operations teams, the intern will help design and ship AI solutions—from prompt design and API integration to monitoring and evaluation—contributing to high-impact internal initiatives.
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Work Arrangement: This is an onsite role requiring 3 days per week in the office.
Key Responsibilities:
AI Engineering & Integration
Design, build, and iterate on AI-powered features and internal tools using LLM APIs (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic, HuggingFace) to improve operational efficiency.
Develop and refine prompts, chains, and agents to automate repeatable tasks and augment decision-making workflows.
Translate business requirements into AI-powered solutions, selecting appropriate models, tools, and integration patterns.
Collaboration & Execution
Work alongside Product Managers, Engineers, and Business Stakeholders to identify high-value opportunities for AI automation and tooling.
Contribute to internal documentation, runbooks, and stakeholder demos that communicate AI system behavior and outputs clearly.
Quality Assurance
Design and execute evaluation frameworks (evals) to measure AI output quality, accuracy, and alignment with business requirements.
Monitor deployed AI features for performance, drift, and edge cases; iterate on prompts and configurations to improve reliability and safety.
Your Success Metrics:
Successful delivery of AI-powered tools or integrations that demonstrably improve team efficiency or automation coverage.
Demonstrated ability to evaluate AI outputs rigorously and iterate based on qualitative and quantitative feedback.
Effective cross-functional collaboration that accelerates AI adoption and ensures solutions are practical and well-documented.
Positive feedback from cross-functional stakeholders on clarity, execution, and results of delivered solutions.
Who you’ll work with:
Product Managers
R&D
Operations Leads
Finance
Core Skills & Competencies:
LLM APIs & Prompt Engineering: Hands-on experience (or strong academic exposure) with LLM APIs such as OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, or HuggingFace; familiarity with prompt design, few-shot techniques, and chaining.
AI Systems Thinking: Curious and methodical thinker who understands how AI components (models, retrievers, evals, guardrails) fit together to produce reliable, business-ready outcomes.
Communication: Able to explain AI system behavior, limitations, and tradeoffs to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Evaluation & Iteration: Comfortable designing test cases and evals to assess AI output quality, and iterating quickly on prompts or architecture based on results.
Project Management: Organized and able to manage multiple AI workstreams simultaneously, balancing speed of experimentation with documentation and quality standards.
What you’ll bring:
Education: Currently pursuing or recently completed a Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, AI/ML, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field.
Experience: Previous internship, coursework, or project work involving LLMs, AI application development, or AI/ML APIs.
Mindset: Self-starter with a growth mindset, eager to learn and contribute.
Technical Aptitude: Comfortable writing Python; familiarity with REST APIs, JSON, and at least one LLM SDK or framework (e.g., LangChain, LlamaIndex, OpenAI SDK).
Collaboration: A team-oriented attitude and willingness to receive and act on feedback.
Preferred, but Not Required:
Experience with RAG pipelines, vector databases (e.g., Pinecone, Weaviate, pgvector), or semantic search
Familiarity with AI observability or evaluation tooling (e.g., LangSmith, Braintrust, Weights & Biases)
Exposure to agentic frameworks (e.g., LangGraph, AutoGen, CrewAI) or multi-modal AI applications
Benefits & Perks:
Fuel Cycle is committed to supporting the well-being, flexibility, and growth of our team. We offer a competitive and inclusive benefits package that includes:
Weekly community lunches, refreshments, and snacks at our LA & NY headquarters
Pet-friendly office environments
Compensation Overview:
The expected hourly pay for this position is $18.50/hr. Your final base salary will be determined based on a variety of factors, including location, work experience, skills, knowledge, education, and certifications.
Commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Equal Opportunity:
At Fuel Cycle, we embrace the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion and are committed to fostering an inclusive company culture. We believe that everyone, regardless of their background or identity, should have equal access to opportunities for growth and advancement. Our selection processes and career pathways are designed to be fair, transparent, and free from bias. We value the unique perspectives and contributions of each team member, knowing that this diverse range of experiences strengthens our team. Fuel Cycle stands firmly against discrimination based on disability, sex, race, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, national origin, age, veteran status, or any other protected status under the law.
Fuel Cycle is an equal opportunity employer and fully comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). We will provide reasonable accommodations for qualified applicants and employees with disabilities, as needed, to enable them to perform the essential functions of their job and participate in the application and interview process. If you require accommodations during any part of the application process, please contact us at hr@fuelcycle.com to discuss your needs.
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