AI & Automation Intern (Summer 2026)

Summary: Sargent & Lundy is a company transforming engineering expertise into innovative solutions for the power and energy sector. They are seeking an AI & Automation Intern to collaborate with engineers and data professionals, contributing to projects that leverage AI and automation to address real-world challenges. The intern will be involved in understanding business problems, developing AI-driven solutions, and working with data to enhance project outcomes. Responsibilities: - Collaborate with team members and business stakeholders to understand challenges before jumping to solutions — learning how to translate a business need into a well-scoped technical approach - Ask clarifying questions, gather context, and help define what “success” looks like for a given project - Contribute to the development of AI-driven solutions and automations using Python and modern frameworks, with guidance from senior team members - Help evaluate different approaches (AI, automation, hybrid) based on the problem at hand — not just default to the most complex option - Assist in building and testing notebooks, scripts, lightweight APIs, or workflow automations that deliver practical value - Support data collection, cleaning, transformation, and feature engineering — learning to treat data prep as a critical problem-solving step - Help identify data quality issues, gaps, or biases and flag them with recommended next steps - Use AI-assisted development tools (GitHub Copilot, Cursor, code generation models) as part of your daily workflow — while thinking critically about what they produce - Explore and contribute to agentic AI workflows, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) patterns, and prompt engineering as part of solution development - Help with solution testing, evaluation, and performance analysis — focusing on understanding results, not just reporting numbers - Participate in team discussions, bringing ideas, questions, and a willingness to challenge assumptions constructively - Contribute to documentation, reports, and presentations that explain what was tried, what worked, what didn’t, and what you’d do differently Required Qualifications: - Currently pursuing a bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Data Science, or a related field - Problem-solving mindset — you can take an ambiguous question, break it into pieces, and make progress even when there's no clear playbook. You're comfortable with 'I'll figure it out.' - Solid academic foundation in core technical areas (e.g., data structures & algorithms, linear algebra, probability/statistics) - Proficiency in Python for scripting, data analysis, or application development - Familiarity with AI/ML concepts (supervised/unsupervised learning, regression, classification, clustering) and a basic sense of when each is useful - Experience with common Python libraries (e.g., NumPy, pandas, scikit-learn). Exposure to frameworks like TensorFlow, PyTorch, or LangChain is a plus - Comfortable using AI-assisted development tools (GitHub Copilot, Cursor, or similar) as a regular part of how you write and iterate on code - Familiarity with Git/GitHub and modern development workflows - Curious and coachable — you actively seek feedback, learn from mistakes, and adapt quickly - Strong written and verbal communication skills — you can explain your thinking clearly, not just your code Preferred Qualifications: - Hands-on experience with agentic AI frameworks, RAG pipelines, or prompt engineering - Experience with data visualization (Matplotlib, Seaborn, Plotly) or interactive notebooks (Jupyter) - Exposure to cloud platforms (Azure, AWS, or GCP) or development practices like CI/CD and containerization - Experience with automation or workflow tools (Power Automate, RPA, or scripting-based process automation) - Participation in hackathons, side projects, research, or open-source work — especially examples where you identified a problem and built something to address it - A portfolio, GitHub profile, or project write-up that shows how you think through problems, not just what you shipped - Demonstrated initiative or ability to juggle academics, projects, and extracurriculars effectively Required Skills: Python, AI/ML concepts, Problem-solving mindset Important Skills: Data structures & algorithms, AI-assisted development tools, Git/GitHub Nice-to-Have Skills: Curious, coachable, automation tools, Hands-on experience with agentic AI, Data visualization, Cloud platforms exposure, communication skills Internship Start Date: Start in 2026 Summer Benefits: Health Plans: Medical, Dental, Vision, Life & Accident Insurance, Disability Coverage, Employee Assistance Program (EAP), Back-Up Daycare, FSA & HSA, 401(k), Pre-Tax Commuter Account, Merit Scholarship Program, Employee Discount Program, Corporate Charitable Giving Program, Tuition Assistance, First Professional Licensure Bonus, Employee Referral Bonus, Paid Annual Personal/Sick Time (PST), Paid Vacation, Paid Holidays, Paid Parental Leave, Paid Bereavement Leave, Flexible Work Arrangements