Data Engineer Internship

About the role

Optimly’s mission is to make AI models scrutable — turning the black box into a glass box. The AI Brand Trust Registry, a verified structured brand data substrate that AI shopping agents read from, has grown from 112 to ~70,000 scored brand profiles since launching in March 2026 and powers live AI‑agent traffic (~1,500 fetches/day from ChatGPT alone). This internship offers direct work on the Registry’s scaling challenges: building ingestion connectors, deduplication and entity‑quality tooling, data quality monitoring, and LLM‑assisted data cleanup, all under the mentorship of the data engineering owner and the founder.

Responsibilities

• Build and harden ingestion connectors for new structured sources (commercial enrichment APIs, government datasets, partner catalog feeds), handling noisy edge cases and documenting source quirks.
• Develop tooling around the production entity‑resolution system: candidate‑pair review interfaces, dedup QA checks, and test fixtures to catch regressions as the entity set scales past 100K.
• Help construct the observability layer: freshness checks, confidence‑distribution dashboards, and alerting that flags upstream data breaks.
• Prototype and evaluate LLM prompts for disambiguation and structured extraction inside the pipeline, measuring accuracy against a ground‑truth set.

Requirements

• Solid SQL and PostgreSQL fundamentals – able to write joins, aggregations, and queries by hand and comfortable digging into a schema.
• Proficiency in Python or TypeScript for writing scripts and small services; willingness to ramp into the other language.
• Prior data ingestion or scripting experience (class project, internship, or personal project) pulling data from a messy API or file and cleaning it into a usable shape.
• Curiosity about using LLMs in pipelines for extraction or disambiguation, not just as a chat feature.
• High agency: asks good questions, flags issues, and makes progress on scoped tasks with minimal direction.

Qualifications

Currently pursuing a BS/MS in Computer Science, Data Science, or a related field.

Benefits

• Strong performers will be considered for a full‑time return offer.
• Flexible start and end dates; part‑time during term considered for the right local candidate.
• Location: Seattle preferred for in‑person collaboration with the founder; open to US‑remote with PST overlap.
• Reports directly to Apurva Luty, CEO/Founder, working alongside the data engineering owner.

Pay

$45–$55 per hour, depending on experience.

Schedule

Internship, full‑time (40 hrs/week); 12 weeks, with flexible start/end dates. Part‑time during term considered for the right local candidate.