AI/ML Engineer Intern

AI / ML Engineer Internship (Unpaid for CPT / OPT Credit)

Location: Fully Remote

Reports To: Product Manager

Job Classification: Internship

Position Type: Full- or Part-Time

Travel: None

Compensation: Unpaid

Who We Are:

ReferU.AI is a leading innovator in legal technology. Our platform is “The Tinder for Finding an Attorney,” using AI/ML to match consumers with attorneys with demonstrable experience representing similar cases according to court records. Our mission is: Smarter Results. Better Representation. The Best Outcomes.

ReferU.AI has been featured in Associated Press, MarketWatch / The Wall Street Journal, Morningstar, Yahoo! Finance, and USAToday, and was recognized as the 30 Most Innovative Companies to Watch and the Legal Tech Innovation Awards.

Life at ReferU.AI

Remote-First Freedom & Flexible Schedules:

ReferU.AI is a diverse and globally distributed team with no plans to return to a physical office. We are fully remote with flexible work hours and an async-first communication culture so you can design your most productive workday.

Deep Work & Maker Time:

We protect engineering focus time through no-meeting blocks, written-first discussions, and clear decision logs. The expectation is impact and shipped value, not hours spent in meetings.

High-Access Leadership & Company Rituals:

You’ll have direct, regular access to leadership and visibility into where the company is going:

• Quarterly Town Halls with the Founder & CEO to walk through strategy, metrics, and milestones.
• Quarterly Demo Days where teams showcase what they’ve shipped and what they’re experimenting with.
• Monthly 1:1s with the Founder & CEO, focused on your career development, not status updates.

Collaboration, Autonomy and True Ownership of Outcomes:

You’ll work closely with product, engineering, go-to-market, and legal experts in small, highly autonomous squads. You’ll be trusted to own projects end-to-end, ask good questions, and iterate quickly while having rapid feedback and support from leadership.

Learning Culture & Monthly Learning Circles:

We’re intentional about learning together, not just alone in docs and repos:

• Monthly Learning Circles where teammates demo a new tool, technique, or experiment to cross-functional teams (engineering, product, legal, GTM).
• A Learning & Development stipend for courses, books, and conferences that align with your growth in AI/ML and our roadmap.

Growth Opportunities & Promoting from Within:

We bias heavily toward promoting from within. All of our current W-2 employees started as unpaid interns and grew into expanded roles as the company scaled. You’ll have:

• Clear opportunities to take on larger projects, own systems end-to-end, and grow your scope.
• A front-row seat to how responsibilities evolve as we grow headcount, revenue, and product surface area.

All-Expenses-Paid Off-Sites Tied to Revenue Milestones:

When we hit tangible revenue goals (for example, clearly defined ARR or MRR milestones), we bring the team together for fully paid company off-sites. Flights, lodging, meals, and activities are covered so we can align on strategy, celebrate hitting those targets, and design what’s next.

Who You Are

• A recent or upcoming M.S. graduate in AI/ML or related fields who wants to work on real, production-grade systems, not just toy examples.
• Comfortable moving from research papers and prototypes to deployed code that serves real users.
• Strong in Python and core ML/LLM libraries, with experience building models, running experiments, and analyzing results.
• Curious about legal reasoning, retrieval, and evaluation, even if you don’t have prior legal domain experience.
• Energized by working in a fast-paced, early-stage startup where you’ll wear multiple hats, navigate ambiguity, and learn quickly.

​​Our Tech Stack

You don’t need to know everything on day one, but you should be excited to work with (and learn) most of this stack:

• Backend & APIs: Node.js, TypeScript, Python, FastAPI / Express
• Frontend & UX: Vercel, React, Next.js, Figma for product/design collaboration
• Orchestration & Agents: CrewAI, n8n, agentic workflows, multi-agent orchestration patterns
• AI / LLM Providers & Libraries: OpenAI, LangChain / LlamaIndex, core Python ML/LLM libraries (PyTorch, TensorFlow, Hugging Face ecosystem)
• Data & Storage: Redis, PostgreSQL / Cloud SQL, vector databases (e.g., pgvector, Pinecone, Weaviate, Chroma)
• Cloud & Infrastructure: Google Cloud (GCP), Docker, GitHub / GitHub Actions, basic monitoring/observability tools
• Analytics & Logging: Event tracking, dashboards, and logging pipelines to understand usage and model behavior

Qualifications

Required:

• M.S. in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Data Science, or a closely related field (or equivalent experience with a strong portfolio).
• 0–2 years of full-time industry experience; strong internships, research assistantships, or substantial personal projects are welcome.
• Proficiency in Python and experience with at least one major ML/LLM framework (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX, Hugging Face Transformers).
• Hands-on experience with at least some of the following (through internships, research, or projects):
• Large Language Models (LLMs) and prompt engineering
• Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) or search over unstructured text
• Embeddings and vector search (e.g., FAISS, pgvector, Pinecone, Weaviate)
• Building small APIs or services to expose models (e.g., FastAPI, Flask, Node.js/Express)
• Comfort working with Git/GitHub, writing clean, testable code, and iterating based on feedback.
• Strong written and verbal communication: able to document experiments, summarize findings, and discuss trade-offs with both technical and non-technical teammates.

Nice-to-Haves:

• Internship or project experience with agentic systems (multi-agent orchestration, tools, planners, or similar frameworks like CrewAI).
• Experience with cloud platforms (GCP, AWS, or Azure), Docker, or CI/CD workflows.
• Experience ingesting and processing unstructured documents (PDFs, HTML, legal or academic texts).
• Background in NLP, information retrieval, or recommendation systems.
• Familiarity with TypeScript/Node.js and basic frontend concepts so you can collaborate closely with full-stack engineers and designers.

What You'll Do

AI/ML Engineering for Link & Fi:

• Implement and iterate on models and pipelines that power Link (intake + attorney matching).
• Help design and improve RAG pipelines: chunking, retrieval, ranking, and context assembly.

Prototype to Production:

• Start with experiments and small-scale prototypes, then help turn successful ideas into reliable, maintainable production services.
• Work with more senior engineers to learn best practices around testing, monitoring, and deployment.

Data & Ingestion Work:

• Contribute to ingestion and processing of legal data sources: dockets, filings, opinions, statutes, and other unstructured documents.
• Help design schemas, embeddings, and features that make retrieval and reasoning more accurate and robust.

Evaluation & Experimentation:

• Run experiments to measure model quality, retrieval performance, and user-facing outcomes.
• Help design small evaluation suites and dashboards that track quality over time (e.g., accuracy, citation correctness, hallucination rate).

Cross-Functional Collaboration:

• Work with product, design, and legal experts to understand user needs and turn them into concrete technical tasks.
• Participate in sprint planning, code reviews, and technical discussions as part of a small, high-ownership team.

Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA): ReferU.AI will provide reasonable accommodations during the application process upon your request as required to comply with applicable laws. If you have a disability and require assistance in this application process, please email accommodations@referu.ai.

EEO Policy Statement: At ReferU.AI, we celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for the benefit of our employees, our company, and our community. As such, ReferU.AI is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, gender identity, and sexual orientation), parental status, national origin, age, disability, genetic information (including family medical history), political affiliation, military service, or other non-merit based factors.