AI & ML Engineering Intern

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Zello is a voice-first communication platform powered by our industry-leading push-to-talk technology to improve collaboration and productivity for desk-less workers. With over 175+ million users we’re the #1 rated push-to-talk app in the world delivering 9 billion (yes with a B) messages a month. 

At Zello our company values are at the heart of what we do everyday. We’re proud to serve the frontline we’re privileged to connect people in times of crisis across the globe and we’re honored to support first responders.

And this is where you come in.

Zello's Data & AI team has shipped customer-facing AI features (Ella assistant AI Insights message summaries AI-powered search) and is now building the internal AI layer that makes every team at the company faster and sharper. We need an engineering intern who can take real operational problems — support triage bottlenecks manual data workflows scattered internal knowledge — and turn them into working AI-powered tools. This is a hands-on building role not a research or observation internship.

You'll report to the Head of Data & AI and work alongside the AI engineering team building internal productivity tools powered by LLMs embeddings and automation. The right person for this role is someone who has already built things with LLMs on their own — not because someone assigned it but because they were curious and wanted to see it work. You'll have real autonomy real users and real impact from week one.

• Shipped at least two internal AI tools that Zello teams rely on weekly — whether that's an automated triage agent a CRM enrichment pipeline an LLM-powered Slack workflow or something we haven't thought of yet

• Contributed meaningful improvements to Zello's AI platform infrastructure — embeddings pipelines RAG systems evaluation frameworks or reusable components the team builds on after you leave

• Measurably reduced manual effort in at least one operational workflow with a clear before/after comparison you can point to

• Documented everything to a standard where another engineer can pick it up and maintain it without calling you

• Design and build internal AI-powered tools using LLM APIs (Claude OpenAI) ML frameworks (PyTorch TensorFlow) and AI-assisted development tools against Zello's data stack (Snowflake dbt)

• Identify automation opportunities by shadowing internal teams (support ops sales) and understanding their real pain points

• Prototype quickly ship working v1s collect feedback from actual users and iterate

• Contribute to shared AI infrastructure — prompt template libraries evaluation harnesses RAG pipeline components data connectors

• Communicate technical ideas clearly grounded in robust scientific and engineering principles

• Present your work and impact to the broader team

• You're currently pursuing or have recently completed a degree in Computer Science Data Science Machine Learning or a related technical field at a top-tier program with a strong academic record

• You've already built at least one working application using an LLM API — a hackathon project a personal tool coursework that produced real software. You didn't just follow a tutorial; you scoped a problem and shipped something

• You understand Python and SQL deeply enough to reason about code structure debug issues and direct AI-assisted development tools (Claude Code Cursor Copilot) to produce high-quality output

• You have familiarity with ML frameworks like PyTorch or TensorFlow — you understand model architectures and can work with existing models not just API wrappers

• You understand how embeddings vector search and retrieval-augmented generation work — even if you haven't deployed them at scale

• You're the kind of person who sees a manual process and instinctively thinks about how to automate it

• You scope your own work. Given a loosely defined problem you ask good questions early propose an approach and then run with it

We hire for potential passion for our mission and a knack for solving difficult problems over checking every qualification box. We have competitive pay equity with significant upside and intentionally design our benefits to encourage healthy and well-balanced employees flexible schedules and time off. We even offer a sabbatical after every five years of service so you’re able to pursue and enjoy what matters most to you. And of course we wouldn’t be a technology company without a ping-pong table and free snacks in our break room. Join us!

Zello provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race color religion age sex national origin disability status genetics protected veteran status sexual orientation gender identity or expression or any other characteristic protected by federal state or local laws.
All Zello personnel are required to comply with defined security privacy and compliance requirements applicable to their role along with requirements that are applicable to all Zello personnel.

What We Do

We started as a company that turned phones into walkie-talkies. Today we modernize instant voice communication with our industry-leading push-to-talk technology to help mobile workers meet quickly changing urgent real-world challenges. We have the highest-rated walkie-talkie app with over 8 billion messages sent per month and 170 million users in industries such as transportation retail construction hospitality healthcare and more. We’re proud to serve frontline workers we’re privileged to connect people in times of crisis across the globe and we’re honored to support first responders. As demand for our app continues to rise we’ve evolved from a startup to a scale-up — and we’re still growing rapidly which is where you come in.

Why Work With Us

If you strive to work on technology with purpose technology that actually changes how people communicate and work then come talk to us. We like people who take pride in their work and deliver with consistency and quality. We're collaborative sometimes serious sometimes not but we're all in 110%.

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