About us:

Based in Berkeley, CA, UPSIDE Foods grows meat, poultry, and seafood directly from real animal cells. These products are not vegan or vegetarian—they are delicious meat, made without the need to raise and slaughter billions of animals. In doing so, the company aims to address some of the most pressing environmental, animal welfare, and public health challenges, while still giving people the meat they love.

Founded as the world's first cultivated meat company in 2015, UPSIDE Foods (formerly Memphis Meats) has achieved numerous industry-defining milestones, including being the first company to produce multiple species of meat (beef, chicken, and duck) and to sell a cultivated meat product in the United States. The company believes that people shouldn't have to choose between the foods they love and a thriving planet, and is working to build a better food system with access to delicious, humane, and sustainable meat, poultry, and seafood.

UPSIDE Foods has won various industry awards, including New York Times' Good Tech Awards, FastCo's Next Big Thing in Tech and World Changing Ideas Awards, and the Best and Brightest Companies to Work For in the Nation by the National Association for Business Resources. UPSIDE Foods has raised more than $600 million in funding from a diverse group of leading U.S. and global investors, including top-tier venture capital firms, sovereign investment funds, strategic food and agriculture partners, and prominent technology and sustainability investors.

About this internship:

At UPSIDE Foods, we're turning the promise of cultivated meat into a delicious, nutritious reality, and we're using AI to do it, from faster R&D to scaled manufacturing and commercial. As an AI Intern within the Enterprise Intelligence team, you'll join a tight‑knit group of data scientists and IT & software developers who partner with our sci/tech teams to use advanced computing to make meat. Your work will advance our AI portfolio and become central to the worldwide scale of cultivated meat, contributing to a sustainable global food system.

This AI Internship is a chance to deliver full life-cycle AI deployments, from stakeholder design to shipping new services. You'll start with data exploration and white‑boarding use‑cases with stakeholders. You might mine time-series data for hidden predictors, or engineer robust pipelines in Python and SQL, or develop AI agentic workflows to accelerate efficiencies. Expect to juggle API integrations, AWS micro‑services, and data‑engineering touchpoints as you weave LLM‑powered chat, search, and automation features directly into existing UPSIDE infrastructure. You'll partner with biologists to ensure your features honor metabolic reality, iterate with manufacturing engineers to translate raw sensor streams in algorithms and push models across scales, and ship crisp visualizations that make complex kinetics intuitive for non‑experts. You'll own meaningful projects from conception to continuous deployment and feedback loops that drive long term business value.

This sixteen week internship will give you a front‑row seat to how AI integrates with mammalian and avian cell biology, and by the end, you'll have deployed three or more applications that drive meaningful value and enable the future of food.

Responsibilities include:

• Collaborate with stakeholders to envision and design AI-first workflows and AI agents that are teammates for UPSIDErs.
• Explore our R&D and MFG data landscape in search of predictive data and insights, and develop custom data pipelines where needed.
• Design and implement AI/ML workflows from data preprocessing to prediction, applicable across bioreactor scales and species.
• Integrate AI solutions within organizational tools (e.g., Slack, Jupyter) and data sources, and leverage dashboards or lower-tech solutions when appropriate.
• Work closely with IT and Data teammates to ensure infrastructure support.
• This internship can be either 20 hrs/wk concurrent with school or 40 hrs/wk full time. Please indicate your preference in your cover letter accordingly.

About you:

• Strong ownership instincts. You're able to drive projects forward and navigate messy cross-functional objectives.
• Proficiency in Data Science, Machine Learning, and AI. You know how to validate models, analyze data, and assess AI tool performance.
• Strong familiarity with modern AI-driven software dev: Python, SQL, git, Docker, DevOps principles, and frontier AI coding, e.g. Claude Code.
• Start up mentality. You're able to gather stakeholder requirements and quickly translate them into MVPs and recur feedback-improvement loops.
• Familiarity with bioprocessing and cell biology concepts.
• Must be able to be on-site 3-days a week at our facility near Berkeley, CA, for full time internships.
• Preference for experience in production environments. You can interface APIs–both your own and otherwise, build in AWS (or equivalent), and can troubleshoot when something goes wrong.
• Preference for recent graduates or those doing a Master's program in AI, computer science, or data science.

Who you'll work with:

• Our Enterprise Intelligence team, who has instrumented our manufacturing and R&D data, steward our data lake, and design models.
• Bioprocess and cellular‑biology engineers and manufacturing staff who will translate model outputs and visualizations into real‑world operations and interventions that boost cell growth, flavor, and yield.
• Cross‑functional R&D partners in analytics, product, and sensory science who rely on your insights to shape the next generation of cultivated meat.
• Leaders across the whole organization who are eager for LLM‑driven data exploration, literature or document review, and workflow acceleration.

Compensation: $25/hr

Length of internship: 16 weeks

UPSIDE Foods is an equal opportunity employer and we value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. Our company-wide mission is to create a product for everyone, so we are deeply committed to having teams and leaders that reflect this mission.