AI Application Developer Intern

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 a total of $608 million, including from the Abu Dhabi Growth Fund (ADG), Baillie Gifford, Bill Gates, Cargill, John Doerr, John Mackey, Kimbal and Christiana Musk, Norwest, Richard Branson, Softbank, Temasek, Threshold, Tyson Foods, and others.

About this job:

At  UPSIDE Foods, pioneering the future of sustainable protein means putting cutting‑edge AI into the hands of every team—from molecular R&D to regulatory affairs to commercial. As an AI Application Developer Intern, you’ll embed with our Enterprise Intelligence team to turn open‑source tech — specifically the Open Web UI platform linked to various paid and free LLMs — into tailored AI copilots that supercharge decision‑making and creativity across the company. You’ll be a seeker of new value, where you’ll connect our rich, domain‑specific datasets with large‑language‑model workflows to go beyond hype to find real productivity and insights for scientists, manufacturing and quality managers, procurement professionals, and others.

Over the course of the internship, you’ll move from data exploration and white‑boarding use‑cases with stakeholders to shipping production‑ready pipelines in Python. You might build a tool that saves minutes for everyone at the company or make one team’s workflow 50% faster. Expect to juggle API integrations, Lambda‑style micro‑services, and data‑engineering touchpoints as you weave LLM‑powered chat, search, and automation features directly into existing UPSIDE infrastructure. By summer’s end, you’ll have vetted one- to two-dozen innovative applications and actually deployed three or more that are driving meaningful value and accelerating the future of food.

Responsibilities include:

• Collaborate with stakeholders to identify and define AI use cases.

• Develop and implement custom AI pipelines using Open Web UI / Python.

• Integrate AI solutions with organizational data sources.

• Work closely with IT and Data teams to ensure infrastructure support.

• Deliver AI applications that provide tangible benefits across departments.

About you:

• Strong Python skills, with experience in AI application development / model interaction.

• Familiarity with Open Web UI or similar LLM interface tooling.

• Demonstrated experience in building AI integrations, including using API’s, Lambda (or equivalent) and pipelines / other transport & transform methodologies..

• Ability to gather requirements and translate them into technical solutions.

• Experience with integrating AI solutions with existing infrastructure.

Who you’ll work with:

• Software development and IT engineers refining prompt‑engineering patterns and maintaining our internal Open Web UI deployment.

• Leaders across the whole organization who are eager for LLM‑driven data exploration, literature or document review, and workflow acceleration.

Length of internship: 10 weeks

Compensation Range: $20/hr - $25/hr*
*Pay may vary depending on factors including job-related knowledge and skills.

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.