Machine Learning / AI Engineering Intern/Co-op

About FirstPrinciples:
FirstPrinciples is a non-profit organization building an autonomous AI Physicist to understand the nature of reality: the underlying structure, governing principles, and fundamental laws of our universe. We're developing an intelligent system that can explore theoretical frameworks, reason across disciplines, and generate novel insights to tackle the deepest unsolved problems in physics. By combining AI, symbolic reasoning, and autonomous research capabilities, we're developing a platform that goes beyond analyzing existing knowledge to actively contribute to physics research. Our goal is to accelerate progress on the questions that have captivated humanity for centuries.

Job Description:
We're seeking Machine Learning / AI Engineering Co-ops for a full-time, 4-month term (January–April 2026). This remote role can be based anywhere in Canada. As a co-op, you will join a team focused on challenges at the intersection of scale, intelligence, and reasoning, contributing to the development of next-generation AI models and agentic frameworks for scientific discovery.

Key Responsibilities:

Depending on your strengths and interests, you might work on:

• Building and optimizing large-scale data and model training workflows for pre-training pipelines.
• Experimenting with reinforcement learning from human feedback, reasoning benchmarks, and alignment methods for fine-tuning and evaluation.
• Designing and scaling multi-agent systems that coordinate reasoning tasks across specialized models for model orchestration.
• Contributing to internal frameworks that enable persistent, memory-augmented AI agents.
• Exploring neural-symbolic architectures and applying LLMs to computational math problems.
• Developing distributed training, inference, and evaluation systems for scale infrastructure.
• Augmenting, designing, and inventing various tools within the ecosystem with interactive user interfaces for UI, graphics, and event-driven programming.

You will own a well-defined project and be treated as a full contributor, with your code potentially going into production and your experiments informing papers and deployed systems.

Qualifications:

• Educational Background: Currently pursuing a degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Math, Physics, or a related discipline.
• Experience:
  • Hands-on work in Python, PyTorch, CUDA or Warp or JAX, React, typescript, webGL
  • Comfort with distributed or large-scale training environments
  • Personal or research projects in ML, LLMs, reinforcement learning, or infrastructure systems
• Skills: Strong programming skills in at least one compiled/systems language (Python, Go, or Rust).
• Collaboration & Communication: Ability to work cross-functionally. Strong communicator who can simplify complex topics for diverse audiences.
• Mindset: Entrepreneurial & mission-driven, comfortable in a fast-growing, startup-style environment, and motivated by the ambition of tackling one of the greatest scientific challenges in history.
• Demonstrated passion for physics and for making scientific knowledge accessible and impactful.

Bonus Skills:

• Contributions to open-source ML frameworks
• Experience with fine-tuning pipelines
• Track record of building tools around reasoning, math, or symbolic systems.

Application Process:

• Interested candidates are invited to submit their resume, a cover letter detailing their qualifications and vision for the role, and references. Please include "Machine Learning / AI Engineering Co-op (Winter 2026)" in the cover letter.

Join us at FirstPrinciples and be a part of a transformative journey where science drives progress and unlocks the potential of humanity.