This role is fully remote and designed to offer guided support and real-world experience to a student or early-career professional. Perfect for building experience and networking. No resume is required and the role is not compensated.

Curastem is a nonprofit building AI-powered mentorship and career guidance tools for people navigating education and work with limited support. As an Applied AI Engineer extern, you will help design, build, and improve AI-powered systems that real people use to make important decisions.

This externship offers the opportunity to invent new ways people interact with AI, develop taste in model selection and system design, and learn how AI systems should be shaped around real customer problems. You will have meaningful autonomy to own small, well-scoped AI work, collaborate closely with product, design, engineering, and data, and contribute to Curastem’s core AI workflows and tools.

What You’ll Do

• Design and build small AI-powered features or workflows to solve specific customer problems

• Develop judgment around model selection, tradeoffs, and system architecture

• Use AI-assisted development tools and MCPs to prototype, test, and iterate quickly

• Help integrate AI systems into existing products, APIs, or internal tools

• Evaluate AI outputs for quality, reliability, and user usefulness

• Collaborate with product and design to define how AI experiences should behave and communicate

• Document system decisions, assumptions, and learnings so others can build on your work

• Experiment with LLMs, prompts, tools, and retrieval patterns

Who You Are

• A student or early-career engineer interested in applied AI, machine learning, or AI systems

• Comfortable working with AI tools or eager to learn

• Curious about how AI models behave in real-world settings

• Interested in building systems that prioritize clarity, trust, and user experience

• Thoughtful about tradeoffs, failure modes, and system boundaries

• Able to learn quickly, take feedback, and iterate based on results

• Clear communicator who enjoys explaining technical ideas

• Able to communicate clearly in written and spoken English