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About the Role

Vals is seeking ambitious and self-driven engineering interns, graduating in 2026. Ideal candidates will have demonstrated ownership over a feature, product, or project, and are excited to contribute meaningfully to a fast-paced, mission-driven team.

Interns at Vals are given real responsibility from day one. You’ll be paired with a dedicated mentor for guidance and support, but will be expected to take initiative and work independently. This is a 3-month (12 week), in-person opportunity based in our San Francisco office.

You’ll begin with a small onboarding project and then take ownership of a well-scoped feature throughout your internship. Weekly check-ins and daily standups ensure you're never blocked and always learning.

Examples of the types of projects you’d be working on include:

• Building a model comparison page for vals.ai.

• Building out a frontend and backend for expert annotators to submit preference data.

• Collecting model traces from systems running in production.

• Creating a guided in-app walkthrough to reduce onboarding time.

What We’re Looking For

• Students currently enrolled in a degree-granting program

• Familiarity and hands-on experience with:

  • React

  • TypeScript (especially strong understanding of typed objects)

  • Python

  • GitHub workflows and best practices

• Strong communication and collaboration skills

• Prior experience contributing to a team-based engineering project

What we offer:

• Highly competitive salary and meaningful ownership. Excellence is well rewarded.

• Travel stipend to relocate to San Francisco.

• Lunch and dinner provided, free snacks/coffee/drinks.

About us:

Founding team: The core methodology behind this platform comes from NLP evaluation research we had done at Stanford. We raised a 5M seed from some of the top institutional and angel investors in the valley. Our team has prior work experience at NVIDIA, Meta, Microsoft, Palantir and HRT. Collectively, we have over 300 citations in our published work.

Tech stack: Our frontend is built in React with TSX. We use Django as our back-end framework. All of our infra is on AWS.

What we value:

• Intelligence is more important than a good-looking resume. Industry experience and pedigree valuable only insofar as it is a proxy for talent itself.

• Ownership to create products. We don’t have the scale or time to actively “manage” every project or task. Working in a small, talent-dense team, we expect everyone to show initiative to build where it’s needed, not where it’s asked. We strive for autonomy over consensus.

• Intensity. The LLM landscape is constantly changing. Foundation model labs are continuously pushing the frontier, enterprises are seeing massive pressure to adopt technology, startups are hungry to chase the white space. The unicorn companies that will emerge from this technology shift are being built now. Those that win will have an incredibly high speed of execution.

• See solutions not problems. We’re not looking for people that pass hard problems to others or admit defeat, but instead only see the opportunity to craft solutions at each juncture.

Further Reading:

• Hugging Face blog on evaluation

• Anthropic’s blog on challenges in evaluation

• New York Times article on issues in benchmarking

• Stanford HAI report showing hallucinations in legal tech tools