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AI Engineer Intern

San Francisco, CA

WHO WE ARE 

Zeta Global (NYSE: ZETA) is the AI-Powered Marketing Cloud that leverages advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and trillions of consumer signals to make it easier for marketers to acquire, grow, and retain customers more efficiently. Through the Zeta Marketing Platform (ZMP), our vision is to make sophisticated marketing simple by unifying identity, intelligence, and omnichannel activation into a single platform – powered by one of the industry’s largest proprietary databases and AI. Our enterprise customers across multiple verticals are empowered to personalize experiences with consumers at an individual level across every channel, delivering better results for marketing programs. Zeta was founded in 2007 by David A. Steinberg and John Sculley and is headquartered in New York City with offices around the world. To learn more, go to www.zetaglobal.com.

We’re hiring an Applied AI Intern to join our AI Enablement efforts, focused on improving developer experience for Zeta’s architecture and engineering teams. You’ll build LLM-powered copilots and AI agents that help engineers and architects move faster and with higher confidence across the software lifecycle: design, implementation, code review, testing, debugging, incident response, and documentation. 

This is a research-forward, engineering-heavy internship: you’ll ship practical internal tooling, but you’ll also bring researcher-grade thinking to evaluation, reliability, and responsible deployment. 

Our team sits at the intersection of technology strategy and hands-on engineering, defining patterns, best practices, and shared services used across multiple teams. The intern will work directly with senior architects and engineers, turning our guidelines and processes into prototypes, utilities, and workflows that can be adopted more broadly. This makes the internship a natural extension of the team’s mission to scale good architecture and engineering practices across the organization.

Summer 2026 Internship Information

  • Real-world, hands-on experience in the marketing technology industry (85% of work in internship role and 15% of internship with professional development/webinars/activities)
  • Hybrid in our San Francisco office (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday in office)
  • June 14th through August 28th
  • $23.00/hour
  • Full-time - 40 hours per week
  • Weekly lunches and social gatherings in office
  • Speaker Series with subject matter experts across Zeta Global

Key Duties & Responsibilities

You may work on one or more of the following: 

  1. LLM-powered developer copilots (grounded + reliable) 

•  Build a copilot that answers engineering questions grounded in internal code, design docs, ADRs, runbooks, and service ownership metadata (RAG with citations, traceability, and “show-your-work” behavior). 

•  Create an “architecture assistant” that helps draft and review design proposals: flags missing non-functional requirements (security/privacy/reliability), highlights tradeoffs, and suggests alternatives. 

  1. AI agents that do real engineering work (tool use + auditability) 

•  Develop agents that can plan and execute multi-step tasks with tool use (e.g., “triage this incident,” “prepare a migration plan,” “generate a release readiness checklist”), producing auditable artifacts. 

•  Assist developer workflows: PR scaffolding, test generation/suggestions, regression risk analysis, dependency upgrades, documentation and release-note drafting. 

  1. Evaluation, safety, and operational excellence for LLM systems 

•  Build evaluation harnesses: offline benchmarks, regression suites, groundedness checks, and “golden task” libraries. 

•  Add instrumentation for LLM systems: quality metrics, latency/cost tracking, failure mode monitoring, and guardrails. 

•  Partner with architecture, platform, and security stakeholders to enable safe internal deployments. 

 

RESEARCH & PUBLICATION OPPORTUNITY 

This internship is designed to be attractive to researchers. Where feasible, projects may be scoped so your work can lead to a publishable outcome (e.g., workshop submission, conference paper, or technical report), subject to internal review for confidentiality, privacy, and responsible disclosure. 

Qualifications

  • Required 

    •  BS in Computer Science, AI/ML, or a related field (or equivalent practical experience). 

    •  Strong Python skills and the ability to build end-to-end prototypes. 

    •  Solid ML fundamentals (experimentation, evaluation, and disciplined thinking about failure modes). 

    •  Familiarity with LLM/agent building blocks: prompt design, RAG, tool/function calling, structured outputs, and evaluation. 

    Highly desirable (we will prioritize these) 

    • MS/PhD in AI/ML/LLMs (or closely related area) 
    • First-author publication in a well-reputed conference/journal 
    • Demonstrated skills building LLM-powered chatbots and AI agents (multi-turn, tool use, memory/state, grounding + evals) 

    Nice to have 

    •  Retrieval/ranking experience (embeddings, chunking strategies, reranking). 

    •  DevEx or systems background (CI/CD, developer tooling, observability, incident workflows). 

    •  Experience hardening LLM systems (prompt injection awareness, red-teaming, policy/guardrails)

PEOPLE & CULTURE AT ZETA

Zeta considers applicants for employment without regard to, and does not discriminate on the basis of an individual’s sex, race, color, religion, age, disability, status as a veteran, or national or ethnic origin; nor does Zeta discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity or expression.  

We’re committed to building a workplace culture of trust and belonging, so everyone feels invited to bring their whole selves to work. We provide a forum for employees to celebrate, support and advocate for one another. Learn more about our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion here:  https://zetaglobal.com/blog/a-look-into-zetas-ergs/ 

ZETA IN THE NEWS!

https://zetaglobal.com/press/?cat=press-releases 

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