AI Systems Engineer Intern

Job Description

About the Job: AI Systems Engineer Intern (Real-time Coordination & Agentic AI)

Our Mission

At Phygtl, we are dedicated to solving the pervasive problem of student social isolation, a challenge affecting over 60% of today’s students and contributing to rising rates of depression and anxiety. We develop innovative technology designed to reduce isolation by up to 40%. Our approach helps students form genuine campus connections through shared real-world moments, effectively bridging the physical and digital worlds.

Who We Are

Headquartered in San Francisco, our exceptional team comprises PhDs from prestigious institutions like Stanford, UC Berkeley, MIT, and Carnegie Mellon. We also boast experienced builders from leading companies such as Niantic, Meta, Magic Leap, Riot Games, Ubisoft, and Zynga. Led by a serial entrepreneur from Silicon Valley, we are united by a powerful mission: to rescue the next generation from Social Atrophy.

Our Moat

Phygtl builds systems that empower students to meet and cultivate identity in real life. Our core product, Vyry, is a context-aware initiation engine where quests culminate in physical action. We believe that true retention is earned through meaningful participation, not merely through notifications.

The Role

You will be an integral part of the team building Vyry, our mobile app designed to facilitate real-life student connections through short, coordinated campus quests.

Our immediate focus is Quest Participation optimization: ensuring peers remain engaged on the quest screen while coordinating via chat, voice, and AR Meet, all without encountering state glitches, drop-offs, or broken real-time behavior.

This role is explicitly not about “building chatbots.” It is about shipping real-time intelligence within a live social product, where state correctness, latency, and user trust are paramount.

What You’ll Work On

• Designing context-aware quest logic (integrating physical, social, and temporal signals).
• Detecting stall or drop-off conditions during coordination.
• Suggesting structured micro-actions that increase quest completion probability.
• Instrumenting evaluation loops directly tied to measurable behavioral outcomes.
• Shipping production-facing components.

You will operate on top of existing real-time systems, rather than rebuilding infrastructure.

What We’re Looking For (Requirements)

You are:

• A strong computer science or engineering student.
• Someone who has shipped real systems (GitHub required).
• Comfortable reasoning about state transitions and edge cases.
• Curious about AI systems beyond simple prompt usage.
• Able to move from idea to working prototype quickly.

You should be able to:

• Design a simple state-aware workflow.
• Think through failure modes comprehensively.
• Explain technical tradeoffs (e.g., latency, cost, reliability).
• Tie technical decisions directly to measurable outcomes.

Bonus if You’ve Built:

• Agentic workflows.
• Multiplayer or event-driven systems.
• Evaluation pipelines for AI systems.
• Side projects used by real users.

How We Evaluate

We prioritize:

• Systems clarity (strong grasp of state and failure thinking).
• Execution speed.
• Ownership.
• Depth over pedigree.

Why Join Phygtl? (Benefits)

Work on a Real Behavioral Problem

You won’t be optimizing clicks. Instead, you will design systems that directly influence real-world human coordination and identity formation. This is AI applied to physical behavior, not merely interface optimization.

Ship Systems That Matter

Your work will be directly tied to critical metrics such as:

• IRL Quest Completion Rate
• D30 Retention

You won’t build experimental features that vanish. You’ll ship essential components used by live campus communities.

Learn From Operators Who’ve Built at Scale

You’ll work alongside our founding team, engineers, and researchers with significant experience from:

• Founder DNA
• Roblox (LLM + search systems)
• Niantic (AR + real-world coordination)
• Stanford / Berkeley / MIT / CMU

Expect deep mentorship and a high-learning environment, not hand-holding.

Operate in a High-Bar, Low-Bureaucracy Environment

We value:

• Meritocracy over pedigree.
• Shipped systems over slide decks.
• Clear thinking over buzzwords.

Ownership is granted early, and responsibility scales directly with performance.

Build a Rare Skill Set

You’ll gain invaluable experience at the intersection of:

• Agentic AI systems.
• Real-time coordination.
• Behavioral metrics.
• Spatial computing.

Few internships offer exposure to this unique and cutting-edge boundary.

Compensation & Structure

• Competitive compensation.
• Flexible remote structure.
• Full-time for 3 months or Part-time for 6 months.
• High ownership within a small team.

How to Apply

Please send a single PDF document including:

• Your CV.
• A link to your GitHub profile.
• A concise architecture walkthrough of one system you built.
• One failure you debugged (describing what broke, why, and what changed).
• A short note (≤300 words) on how you would increase IRL Quest Completion by 15%.

We review for depth of thought and execution, not buzzwords.

Desired Skills and Experience

Agentic AI, State Modeling, LLM Orchestration, Agentic Engineering, Systems Design