Machine Learning Engineering Intern (Summer 2026)
at ZeroEntropy — Artificial Specialized Intelligence
What the role involves
About Us
- ZeroEntropy is building next-generation technology for information retrieval over complex unstructured data.
- We are a team of engineers and scientists from Berkeley, CMU, Ecole Polytechnique, USACO, and have become experts in information retrieval technologies.
- We are a well funded startup out of Y Combinator, and have already gained great traction in the last few months.
- We are looking for a highly skilled intern developer to join us on our mission to build the future of search.
What you will work on
- Contribute to all phases of the development lifecycle, from theoretical research to deployment.
- Create state-of-the-art ML models, including LLMs for information retrieval, rerankers, embedding models, etc.
- Work autonomously on complex projects involving compilers, OS-level work, assembly, but also model architecture, training optimization, and more.
- Create scalable and low-latency infrastructure for a state-of-the-art search engine / database using Rust and k8s.
- Talk to customers to understand their needs, and improve on the technology to meet them.
Requirements
- Proficiency in Rust/C/C++, Python, SML/OCaml, Assembly.
- Deep understanding of the tech stack down to the metal, including experience with assembly, EVM, graphics shaders, CUDA, or kernel work.
- Deep understanding of theoretical foundations in mathematics and computer science, including combinatorics/number theory/abstract algebra.
- Solid grasp of computer science fundamentals like algorithms, data structures, and time complexity, but also knowledge of functional programming concepts like map, filter, and reduce.
- Familiarity with software design principles and best practices.
- Experience or willingness to learn about scalability technologies like AWS/Azure, Docker, and Kubernetes.
Bonus
any background in math/programming competitions.
About the internship
- Based in person in San Francisco.
- Small startup where you’ll be working closely with both founders, and exceptionally gifted interns already joining us for the summer.
About ZeroEntropy
We are on a mission to build the world’s most accurate, fastest, and cheapest task-specific models for every production AI system. Most AI products, whether copilots, agents, or search systems, depend on frontier LLMs to handle every step of their pipeline. Yet, the vast majority of these steps are narrow, repeatable workloads: reranking, embedding, classification, routing, query rewriting, context compression, where frontier intelligence is overkill. Running them on general-purpose models is slow and expensive, capping what production AI can achieve. That is why we're building ZeroEntropy: to train small, task-specific models that replace frontier LLMs on these workloads, and empower developers to ship AI products that are more accurate, faster, and cheaper.
Full ZeroEntropy profile