Bengaluru | In-Person | Full-Time

About Us

The default answer in AI today is “throw a bigger model at it.” We think that’s the wrong shape for what’s coming next. We build small, specialized AI models so that intelligence can be fast, affordable, and invisible - embedded in the products that already do the work.

Conscious Engines is a research lab building small, specialized AI models - fine-tuned, distilled, and task-optimized for specific domains and use cases. Our thesis is simple: a well-trained specialist will consistently outperform a larger generalist on the tasks that actually matter, at a fraction of the cost, latency, and footprint.
We publish our work, we take evaluation and infrastructure seriously, and we build research and products under one roof so each sharpens the other.

About The Internship

You'll spend the summer inside a small AI research lab that ships. Half-soldered boards on the desks, a whiteboard nobody's erased in three weeks, a model training in the corner, an espresso machine that's seen things. The work sits in the gap between paper and product — how small can a useful model get? what does it take to run inference on a battery? how do you test an AI that's supposed to act on its own? Monday you get a real question and a bench to work at. By Friday something's working. It's held together with conviction and a print statement, but it works, and there's a new question waiting.

You'll pick up tools you've never used, read papers from last month and code from yesterday, and probably end up doing something you didn't expect to be doing — debugging a training run if you came in for hardware, picking up a soldering iron if you came in to write code. We won't manage you — we'll walk past your desk, ask what you're up to, get excited, and walk off. End the summer pointing at one thing — a paper draft, a shipped feature, a working device on your bench — and you've done it right. End the summer with all three, and we'll probably try to keep you.

The Vibe

There is no #intern-onboarding channel. There is no 30-60-90 day plan. You'll get a real problem on day one and a working version of something by Friday.

If "f**k around and find out" makes you reach for a soldering iron, open Code Editor, or start writing a Substack post - yeah, this is for you.

Also props if you're terminally online.

What You’ll Do

Depends on what you're good at and what's on fire that week. Could be any combination of:

Train, fine-tune, or break small language models
Ship iOS / Swift product features that hit TestFlight by Friday or experimental web apps
Solder, prototype, and embed our models in something with sensors and a battery
Run experiments - benchmark, evaluate, write up the results
Build internal tooling that makes everyone else faster

Who We Want

Builders. A GitHub / Figma / Substack / project drive that proves you actually make things, not just plan them.
Curious across disciplines - comfortable being a beginner in something new every two hours.
You ask a lot of questions but stop midway because you answered it on your own as you spoke
You ship.
You're nice to be around.

Bonus Points

If You've Trained a model. Shipped an iOS app. Designed a PCB. Run a community. Started a Substack. Made a thing your friends actually use. Any of the above counts.

The Setup

📍 12th Main, Indiranagar, Bangalore

🏢 Full-time, in-office - we believe in collaborative working in person. The best work happens when you're in the room together.

💰 Compensation - Yes fixed stipend!

⚡ Culture: Early-stage energy, high taste, no bulls**t.

🎯 Team: Small, obsessed, taste-driven. We don't tolerate mediocrity.

We work fast. We care about details. We ship every week. Strong opinions, weakly held.

Summer Internship at Conscious Engines