Company: Akoncagua.AI

Location: Lakeland, Florida (Onsite)

Employment Type: Internship

We are seeking a passionate and driven AI/ML Engineer Intern to join Akoncagua.AI, where we are building next-generation domain-specific Large Language Models (LLMs) and intelligent AI solutions. In this role, you will work alongside experienced AI engineers on real-world challenges involving large-scale data processing, model training, LLM fine-tuning, evaluation, optimization, and deployment. This internship provides an opportunity to gain hands-on experience across the end-to-end machine learning lifecycle while contributing to the development of production-grade AI systems. Candidates should have a strong interest in machine learning, deep learning, transformer architectures, and Generative AI, along with solid programming, problem-solving, and data structures and algorithms skills. Experience through academic projects, research, open-source contributions, or personal work in AI/ML is highly valued.

Key Responsibilities

Fine-tune, evaluate, and optimize Large Language Models (LLMs) for domain-specific applications.

Work extensively with transformer architectures, including encoder-decoder and decoder-only models.

Design and experiment with prompt engineering techniques to improve model performance and reliability.

Prepare, clean, preprocess, and transform large-scale unstructured datasets into high-quality training datasets.

Build and maintain scalable machine learning pipelines for training, evaluation, and deployment.

Assist in distributed training, model optimization, quantization, and inference acceleration.

Collaborate with AI engineers to develop and deploy production-ready ML solutions on AWS.

Conduct research and experimentation on emerging LLM techniques, retrieval systems, and advanced deep learning architectures.

Monitor model performance and contribute to continuous improvement initiatives.

Participate in technical discussions, code reviews, and knowledge-sharing sessions.

Required Qualifications

Currently pursuing a Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, or a related field.

Strong programming skills in Python.

Hands-on experience with:PyTorch scikit-learn Hugging Face Transformers Pandas

Strong understanding of:Machine Learning fundamentals ,Deep Learning, Transformer Architectures, Natural Language Processing (NLP),Large Language Models (LLMs)

Practical experience fine-tuning transformer-based models and LLMs through academic, personal, research, or industry projects.

Strong mathematical foundation in:Linear Algebra Probability Statistics Optimization

Experience with data preprocessing, feature engineering, data cleaning, and dataset preparation for large-scale model training.

Familiarity with Git and software development best practices.

Strong understanding of Data Structures, Algorithms, and Problem-Solving techniques.

Highly Preferred Qualifications

Demonstrated expertise in transformer architectures through significant personal projects, research work, publications, or open-source contributions.

Strong portfolio showcasing LLM fine-tuning, NLP systems, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), or deep learning projects.

Experience with GPU-based model training and distributed training frameworks.

Experience working with large-scale datasets using Pandas, PySpark, or distributed data processing systems.

Previous internship, research assistantship, or industry experience in Machine Learning, NLP, Generative AI, or Deep Learning.

Contributions to open-source AI/ML projects.

Research publications related to Machine Learning, LLMs, NLP, or Transformer Architectures.

Active competitive programming profile with strong performance on platforms such as LeetCode, HackerRank, Codeforces, or similar.

Candidates who consistently solve advanced LeetCode problems and demonstrate strong algorithmic problem-solving skills will be highly preferred.

Pay: $20.00 - $25.00 per hour

Work Location: In person