AI Engineer Intern

Experience > Skills in tech hiring.

A recent a16z chart shows that since January 2025, tech companies have been asking for more experience and fewer specific skills.

Their explanation matters:

“When you’re operating on a new frontier, you don’t yet know what you’ll need.”
So companies value people who have already learned how to figure things out.

That makes sense from an employer’s perspective.

But it also creates a difficult loop for recent graduates:
You need experience to get a job.
You need a job to gain experience.

One of my friends spent nearly 6 months searching before finally landing a role. The market has been brutal :(

If I were graduating today, this would be my playbook:

1. Write thoughtful cold emails to founders. Show that you understand what they are building.
2. Take an internship, even if it is not your dream role. Optimize for ownership and learning.
3. Build real projects and publish them. One working product is worth more than ten unfinished courses.
4. Treat GitHub as your public résumé. Show how you build, document, and iterate.
5. Share what you learn publicly. Write about your decisions, failures, and improvements.
6. Learn to move fast. Startups remember people who turn vague problems into working solutions. And referrals go a long way.

We are hiring AI Engineer Interns at Lighthouz AI.

If you have worked with documents or Document AI, enjoy difficult problems, and can move lightning fast, comment “intern”. I will to open job link sooner, so please keep an eye.

You may not have years of experience yet.

But you can start building evidence of it today.