LLM Inference & Integration Engineer Intern at Space Dynamics Laboratory

LLM Inference & Integration Engineer Intern

Job

Date Posted:
November 4, 2025

The Space Dynamics Laboratory (SDL), a University Affiliated Research Center (UARC), has been developing innovative technologies and solutions for cutting‑edge DoD and intelligence programs for over six decades.

SDL’s internship program provides an exciting opportunity for undergraduate and graduate students to get involved with state‑of‑the‑art technologies in space‑, airborne‑, and ground‑based systems. With the support of Engineers and mentors, Interns are able to work on professional‑level assignments that complement their academic studies. The program also includes training workshops, networking opportunities, and a variety of summer events and activities. Interns will be paid a competitive monthly stipend and will be tasked with varying duties based on current projects, needed support, and development phase.

The Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (C4

ISR) Systems Division is seeking an exceptional Large Language Model (LLM) Inference & Integration Engineer Intern to assist in building and integrating local LLM inference pipelines.

The C4

ISR Systems Division delivers mission‑critical solutions, specializing in cyber operations, information architecture, strategic deterrence, and ISR. Our division’s commitment to innovation and security enables us to provide critical solutions across defense, intelligence, and national security. Join our team and contribute to the next generation of defense technologies.

This position has the potential of continued employment or transition to student/full‑time employment requiring security clearance eligibility.

This internship is for the summer of 2026.

• Prototypes and product ionizes automation workflows that run local, open‑weight LLMs using portable inference runtimes and quantized model formats
• Integrates LLM chains with internal tools using standard chat/completions‑style APIs (prompting, function/tool calling, streaming)
• Optimizes inference (quantization choices, context length, batching) for speed/memory on CPU/GPU
• Builds small services/CLIs to run batch jobs, evaluate outputs, and log metrics
• Writes clear documentation and example notebooks for other Engineers to reuse your pipelines
• Contributes tests and lightweight evals to ensure reliability and prevent regressions

• Experience running local/open‑weight models with open‑source inference runtimes on CPU and/or GPU
• Familiarity with quantized model artifacts/formats and loaders for edge/desktop deployment
• Experience calling chat/completions‑style REST APIs in code (JSON, streaming, function/tool calling)
• Proficiency in at least python, C++, or C#
• 6+ months of regular development on Linux:
  Bash scripting, package managers, SSH (key‑based auth), Git, file permissions, and basic networking tools; comfortable building from source (CMake/Make) and troubleshooting dependencies
• Solid understanding of prompts, context windows, and tokenization basics
• Ability to work well independently with minimal supervision
• Ability to work well in a team with other students and professionals
• Strong initiative and ability to see the job through
• Good communication skills, both written and verbal
• Must be a US citizen, lawful permanent resident of the US, or other US person

• Experience documenting generation pipelines using LLM outputs (Markdown/HTML/PDF, templating)
• Basic RAG/evals (embedding stores, quality checks, hallucination guards)
• Experience with Docker, CUDA/ROCm, and profiling/benchmarking
• Experience with team collaborative tools (Confluence, Jira, Git Hub, etc.)
• Experience leveraging LLMs to interpret user intent and generate spatial queries over vector and raster data, delivering ranked imagery and regions with documented provenance
• Experience applying object detection and segmentation to overhead imagery, including georeferenced tiling, large‑scene processing, and packaging inference as scalable batch jobs and services

• Must be pursuing a degree in computer science, computer engineering, or electrical engineering
• Must be a junior, senior, or graduate…