Artificial Intelligence Intern

The Massachusetts Port Authority is Going Above and Beyond for your career. We are a dynamic organization that connects people and businesses to the global community by air, land, and sea. Our employees are essential in moving planes, cargo and cruise ships safely, efficiently and sustainably. We are an economic engine, managing real estate assets where people live, work, and play.

Together, the properties we own and operate generate $20 billion for the region’s economy.

As the digital heartbeat of our organization, the Information Technology (IT) Department fuels the seamless operation of Massport. Driven by our commitment to excellence, we harness the power of technology to solve real-world challenges and enable the organization to achieve its business goals with exceptional efficiency. Our team embraces development and diversity, constantly seeking new opportunities for innovation and growth, to help shape the future of our agency and set new standards for excellence.

The AI Engineering Intern supports Massport’s AI & Innovation team in rapidly designing, building, and testing prototypes that apply artificial intelligence, software development, and emerging technologies to real operational challenges across aviation, maritime, and enterprise environments.

This position is intended for a highly curious and technically motivated student or early-career engineer who enjoys building and experimenting with new technology. The intern will work alongside software developers, solution architects, designers, and business stakeholders to transform ideas into functional proofs-of-concept using modern AI models, open-source technologies, cloud platforms, APIs, and AI-assisted development tools.

The position emphasizes rapid experimentation and prototyping. Successful candidates should be comfortable learning new frameworks quickly, leveraging existing open-source projects, using AI-powered development environments, and independently exploring technical approaches while receiving guidance from senior members of the team.

• Assist in designing and building functional AI prototypes, internal tools, automations, and proofs-of-concept addressing Massport business and operational challenges.
• Develop applications and scripts primarily using Python and modern software-development frameworks.
• Use AI-powered development tools and IDEs such as Cursor, Git Hub Copilot, Claude Code, or comparable technologies to accelerate development, debugging, testing, and documentation.
• Explore and adapt open-source projects, libraries, models, and frameworks to rapidly evaluate new technical capabilities.
• Build simple web applications, APIs, scripts, and backend services that demonstrate new ideas and workflows.
• Participate in rapid development cycles where prototypes are built, demonstrated, evaluated, and improved based on user feedback.

• Develop prototypes utilizing commercial frontier models and locally hosted or open-source language models.
• Assist in building Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) applications that connect AI models with documents, databases, APIs, and enterprise information.
• Gain hands‑on experience with technologies including:
  • Large Language Models (LLMs)
  • Small Language Models (SLMs)
  • Open-source models
  • Embeddings
  • Vector databases
  • Semantic search
  • Prompt engineering
  • Tool/function calling
  • AI agents and automated workflows
• Evaluate when different model types are appropriate based on capability, speed, privacy, infrastructure requirements, and cost.
• Assist with testing AI systems for accuracy, reliability, usability, and expected behavior.

• Research emerging AI technologies, open‑source repositories,…