{"id":723401,"url":"https://alion.io/job/cheiron-agent-engineering-intern","title":"Agent Engineering Intern (Los Altos)","company":{"id":673520,"name":"Cheiron","domain":"cheiron.bio","url":"https://alion.io/company/cheiron","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":95,"open_postings":9,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":91,"computed_at":"2026-10-22T06:10:10Z"}},"role":"Early Careers","role_family":"Early Careers","seniority":"intern","employment_type":"internship","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Los Altos, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":35,"max":55,"currency":"USD","period":"hour","gross":null,"usd_annual":110000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Function Calling","optional":false},{"name":"LLM Evaluation","optional":false},{"name":"FastAPI","optional":true},{"name":"PostgreSQL","optional":true},{"name":"Python","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-02T00:32:44Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-02","last_verified_at":"2026-10-22T16:38:39Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":50,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":0,"flags":[],"days_open":50},"description":"Los Altos, CA · Engineering · Internship · Semester/quarter or summer · Fully in-person\nCompany Overview\nIn July 2026, Cheiron announced an $8 million seed round led by Menlo Ventures, bringing total funding to $13 million to date, with the backing and strategic support of industry veterans including Moderna co-founder and MIT Institute Professor 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.\nCheiron is building the first AI-native operating system designed to represent an entire drug program as a single connected system. The company's platform helps biopharma teams represent, reason over, and stress-test the full state of a drug development program, including the claims, evidence, assumptions, risks, decisions, and commitments that determine whether a therapy advances. In less than six months since launch, Cheiron has been adopted by tens of thousands of biopharma professionals and deployed by major drug developers, and is already used by 7 of Korea's top 10 biopharma companies.\nCheiron is expanding into pharmaceutical CMC (Chemistry, Manufacturing, and Controls) teams. CMC governs how a drug is made, tested, and kept consistent across its entire commercial life. The work involves hundreds of regulatory commitments, post-approval changes, and cross-market submissions. Today it runs on documents, spreadsheets, and institutional memory. Cheiron augments manual workflows with a CMC regulatory-specific intelligence and reasoning layer.\nFounded in 2024 by Stanford-trained AI researchers. The team includes leaders with combined decades of experience across pharma and biotech. Headquartered in Los Altos, California. We are building and deploying the product now with rapid expansion into global markets.\nAbout the Role\nWe're looking for an Agent Engineering Intern to build new agent-driven workflows inside Cheiron's product.\nCheiron'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.\nThis is an Applied Engineering Role. 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.\nWhat You'll Do\nDesign and implement new agent workflows with explicit state, task decomposition, tool use, and typed outputs.\n\nBuild retrieval and citation paths that ground important outputs in source evidence.\n\nAdd evaluation, tracing, retries, observability, and recovery behavior for multi-step execution.\n\nBuild the backend services, data models, APIs, and focused product surfaces required to make the workflow useful.\n\nTest agent behavior against realistic success cases, failure cases, and incomplete evidence.\n\nWork directly with engineers and domain experts, demonstrate progress frequently, and make pragmatic scope decisions.\n\nRequirements\nCurrently pursuing an undergraduate or master's degree in computer science, computer engineering, or a related technical field.\n\nStrong programming fundamentals and experience building a substantial software project, developer tool, backend system, or open-source contribution.\n\nHands-on experience building a nontrivial agent, retrieval system, tool-using workflow, evaluation harness, or multi-step automation system.\n\nClear personal ownership of the work: you can explain what you implemented, the decisions you made, and what you would improve.\n\nAbility to reason about state, failure modes, grounding, evaluation, and engineering tradeoffs-not only prompts and model selection.\n\nHigh agency and comfort working through ambiguous problems in a fast-moving environment.\n\nAbility 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.\n\nNice to Have\nExperience with Python, FastAPI, Postgres, agent frameworks, retrieval systems, or vector databases.\n\nBackend, distributed-systems, infrastructure, data-pipeline, or end-to-end product experience.\n\nExperience with tests, deployment, observability, security, or reliable failure handling.\n\nExperience building systems involving citations, provenance, human review, or other high-stakes correctness requirements.\n\nStrong open-source work, prior software-engineering internships, or an independently shipped product with real users.\n\nCompensation\n$35-$55 per hour. Exact compensation within the range depends on demonstrated expertise, relevant experience, and the time the student can commit.\nLocation, Relocation & Visa\nThis role is fully in person in Los Altos, CA. Academic-term interns must be able to work from the office at least 20 hours per week; summer interns should expect a full-time commitment. Relocation assistance may be offered selectively to a strong candidate and is not guaranteed. Candidates of any nationality or visa status may be considered when the internship can be employed legally.\nInterview Process\nSemester/quarter route:\n30-minute introductory call → one-day onsite in Los Altos → decision.\n\nSummer route:\n15-minute introductory call → take-home assignment → take-home interview → interview with Backend Team → decision.\n\nFor some summer candidates, the final two interviews may instead be combined into a one-day onsite in Los Altos.\n\nEqual Opportunity & Accommodation\nCheiron is an equal-opportunity employer. We consider all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.","description_format":"text","description_chars":5978,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"master","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Relocation assistance"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":true,"industries":["Biotechnology","LLM & Generative AI","Medical AI"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-11T07:42:18Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":59,"band":"ok","label":"Likely open","p_open":1,"p_active":0.816,"p_room":0.72,"age_days":50,"expected_fill_days":91,"reasons":["conf:0","win:mid","crowd:junior"],"computed_at":"2026-10-22T06:10:10Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":110000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/cheiron-agent-engineering-intern","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/cheiron-agent-engineering-intern.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-22T16:59:41Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":17750,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-23T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":673520},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=673520"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fcheiron-agent-engineering-intern"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fcheiron-agent-engineering-intern"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fcheiron-agent-engineering-intern"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/cheiron-agent-engineering-intern\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fcheiron-agent-engineering-intern"}]}