Software Engineer (Intern)

At MAI (pronounced “my”), we're on a mission to democratize advanced advertising technology. We believe that cutting-edge marketing tools, once exclusive to large enterprises with massive budgets, should be accessible to everyone. Our platform uses AI agents to automate and optimize performance marketing, empowering small and mid-sized businesses to scale their ad spend profitably without the need for an agency or endless hours of manual campaign management.

Founded by ad platform veterans from Google and Instacart, we've successfully raised a $25 million Seed funding round led by Kleiner Perkins to accelerate our growth. This capital will be used to expand our product and engineering teams, bringing our vision of intelligent, autonomous marketing to life. Our AI agents have already proven their value, helping clients drive 40% more sales and managing millions in monthly Google Ads spend. Our client waitlist is growing by the day and we couldn’t be more excited about building the future of growth marketing.

While traditional software has a clear playbook, building the infrastructure for autonomous, intelligent agents is a new frontier—and we're writing the manual.

As a Software Engineer Intern at MAI, you won't just be writing code; you'll contribute to helping architect the entire ecosystem where our AI agents live, learn, and operate. You will have a unique opportunity to apply your deep research expertise to real-world, high-impact problems.

This is a rare opportunity to build a truly AI-native product from the ground up and solve problems at the forefront of the industry.

You won't just be a cog in a large machine. You'll learn how to be an athlete on a small, focused team of fewer than ten engineers, with immense impact and the ability to shape the future of our company. We're in the early days of forming three core teams:

• Product Engineering & Infrastructure

• AI Platform & Foundation

• Agent Application & Quality

You'll have the unique chance to learn and grow your skillset. We encourage you to lean on your specializations while taking on new projects you've never done before, learning from your peers and becoming a more well-rounded engineer.

• Architect and Prototype Novel Solutions: You will apply your advanced research skills to design and prototype new features for our core agentic platform, exploring cutting-edge algorithms and architectures to improve our autonomous agents' capabilities. This isn't just about building, it's about inventing.

• Contribute to a Robust Platform: Design, build, and maintain the critical infrastructure that supports our autonomous agents, focusing on scalability, reliability, and performance.

• Tackle Complex Challenges: Solve novel, ambiguous problems at the intersection of AI, large-scale systems, and high-stakes performance marketing.

• Collaborate and Grow: Work closely with a world-class team of engineers and researchers, engaging in design discussions, code reviews, and knowledge sharing to advance our collective understanding of agentic systems.

• Currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science or a related quantitative field with a focus on areas such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, large language models, or distributed systems.

• A strong theoretical foundation and a proven ability to conduct and apply original research.

• Proficiency in a modern programming language (e.g., Python).

• Passion for turning groundbreaking research into robust, scalable production systems.

Bonus points for experience in any of the following:

• Machine Learning/AI: Experience implementing or fine-tuning models from research papers, or a strong publication record in top-tier conferences.

• Large Language Models (LLMs): Hands-on experience with LLM-based systems, including a deep understanding of their underlying architectures and challenges like hallucination or prompt engineering.

• Complex Systems: Experience designing and debugging large-scale distributed systems or data pipelines.

This internship is designed to bridge the gap between academic research and real-world application. You will be embedded with our core engineering team to tackle some of our most challenging, long-term problems. Your work might include:

• Exploring new agentic architectures and running experiments to evaluate their performance.

• Applying and adapting the latest research papers on topics like memory, reasoning, or long-term planning into our production systems.

• Conducting rigorous performance analysis on our ML pipelines to identify and resolve bottlenecks at a fundamental level.

• Unparalleled Learning: You'll be at the forefront of AI engineering, solving novel challenges in building scalable, reliable systems for autonomous agents and LLMs.

• High Impact: As an early member of a lean and powerful team, your work will directly shape our core platform, our culture, and the success of our customers.

• A Culture of Curiosity: We're a tight-knit team of passionate builders who value transparency, first-principles thinking, and a relentless drive to solve hard problems together.

• Ownership: We believe in empowering our team. You'll have autonomy over your work with mentorship support from an assigned team member.

Are you ready to build the future with us? We believe in a holistic approach to hiring. If you're passionate about our mission and have a drive to learn and grow, we encourage you to apply even if you don't meet every single requirement. We value potential, curiosity, and hunger. We can't wait to hear from you.