Agent Engineering Intern

Los Altos, CA
· Engineering
· Internship
· Semester/quarter or summer
· Fully in-person

Cheiron recently raised an $8M seed round led by Menlo Ventures , and now has $13M total raised
. The round also included strategic support from Moderna co-founder Robert Langer, former Pfizer Chief Medical Officer Freda Lewis-Hall, Chai Discovery co-founder and CEO Josh Meier, former Starbucks CEO Laxman Narasimhan, and former Apple AI chief John Giannandrea.

Cheiron is building the first AI-native operating system designed to represent an entire drug program as a single connected system. The platform helps biopharma teams represent, reason over, and stress-test the claims, evidence, decisions, and commitments, driving the drug program to completion.

We’re looking for an Agent Engineering Intern to build new agent-driven workflows inside Cheiron’s product.

Cheiron’s agents do more than generate an answer. They break complex objectives into steps, retrieve evidence, call tools, maintain state across long-running work, recover from failures, and produce structured results that a person can review and trust. You will own a bounded workflow and help take it from an ambiguous problem to a reliable, working product.

This is an applied engineering role, not an AI research internship. We care about strong software fundamentals, hands-on ownership, and evidence that you have built nontrivial systems yourself. The role is best suited to undergraduate and master’s students who are already serious builders.

• Design and implement new agent workflows with explicit state, task decomposition, tool use, and typed outputs.

• Build retrieval and citation paths that ground important outputs in source evidence.

• Add evaluation, tracing, retries, observability, and recovery behavior for multi-step execution.

• Build the backend services, data models, APIs, and focused product surfaces required to make the workflow useful.

• Test agent behavior against realistic success cases, failure cases, and incomplete evidence.

• Work directly with engineers and domain experts, demonstrate progress frequently, and make pragmatic scope decisions.

• Currently pursuing an undergraduate or master’s degree in computer science, computer engineering, or a related technical field.

• Strong programming fundamentals and experience building a substantial software project, developer tool, backend system, or open-source contribution.

• Hands-on experience building a nontrivial agent, retrieval system, tool-using workflow, evaluation harness, or multi-step automation system.

• Clear personal ownership of the work: you can explain what you implemented, the decisions you made, and what you would improve.

• Ability to reason about state, failure modes, grounding, evaluation, and engineering tradeoffs—not only prompts and model selection.

• High agency and comfort working through ambiguous problems in a fast-moving environment.

• Ability to work fully in person in Los Altos. Semester or quarter interns must commit at least 20 hours per week; summer interns should be available full time.

• Experience with Python, FastAPI, Postgres, agent frameworks, retrieval systems, or vector databases.

• Backend, distributed-systems, infrastructure, data-pipeline, or end-to-end product experience.

• Experience with tests, deployment, observability, security, or reliable failure handling.

• Experience building systems involving citations, provenance, human review, or other high-stakes correctness requirements.

• Strong open-source work, prior software-engineering internships, or an independently shipped product with real users.

$35-$55 per hour. Exact compensation within the range depends on demonstrated expertise, relevant experience, and…