Intern, AI Engineering

Neurodegenerative diseases are one of the largest medical challenges of our time. Denali Therapeutics is a biotechnology company dedicated to developing breakthrough therapies for neurodegenerative diseases through our deep commitment to degeneration biology and principles of translational medicine. Denali is founded on the collaboration of leading scientists, industry experts, and investors who share the vision that scientific discovery energetically applied to translational medicine is the key to delivering effective therapies to patients.

We invite you to consider an opportunity with Denali to help achieve our goal of delivering meaningful therapeutics to patients.

Denali is seeking a motivated candidate for an internship position in the AI Engineering team to design and build internal AI-powered tools that leverage large language models to automate knowledge-intensive workflows across the drug development lifecycle.

Responsibilities

• Architect and develop internal LLM-based applications that transform complex, multi-source scientific and clinical data into structured, high-quality written outputs aligned with institutional standards

• Design and implement structured prompt engineering systems that encode domain-specific knowledge, templates, and writing conventions into repeatable, auditable AI workflows

• Build context-assembly pipelines that programmatically combine heterogeneous source documents, reference standards, and structured data into optimized LLM input for generation tasks

• Develop rigorous evaluation frameworks that benchmark AI-generated outputs against expert-authored reference documents, using both automated metrics and human review to measure quality, accuracy, and compliance

• Collaborate closely with subject matter experts to capture institutional knowledge and iteratively refine AI systems that reflect Denali’s specific standards, rather than producing generic output

• Present findings and deliverables to technical and non-technical stakeholders, including a final internship presentation summarizing project outcomes, evaluation results, and strategic recommendations

Requirements

• Candidates pursuing a Master’s or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, or a related quantitative field

• Self- and results-driven, organized, resourceful, adaptable and collaborative

• Bold and creative thinker with a curious nature, eager to learn about the complexities of the business of healthcare and biotech

• Evident communication and analytical skills

• High degree of proficiency with the MS Office Suite or Google Workspace equivalent

• Demonstrable hands-on experience building applications with large language models, including structured prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), context window management, or fine-tuning; evidenced through a portfolio, GitHub repositories, publications, or prior project work

• Strong proficiency in Python with practical experience using LLM APIs (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic, or open-source models via Hugging Face) and NLP libraries for text processing, generation, and evaluation

• Experience designing template-based or rule-driven generation systems that encode domain-specific standards into AI outputs, and comfort working with structured and semi-structured document formats (e.g., XML, JSON, PDF, DOCX)

• Experience developing evaluation methodologies for AI-generated text, including automated quality metrics and systematic comparison against human-authored reference outputs; familiarity with life sciences, clinical data, or regulated industries is strongly preferred

• Builder mentality with a preference for developing custom internal solutions over relying on off-the-shelf vendor platforms; strong software engineering fundamentals including version control (Git), iterative prototyping, testing, and documentation

Job Facts

• Start Date: Summer 2026

• Length of Assignment: 8 - 12 weeks

• Location: South San Francisco, CA

• Job Type: Paid Internship

This compensation and benefits information is based on Denali’s good faith estimate as of the date of publication and may be modified in the future.
 

Denali is committed to its core company value of unity by creating a diverse and inclusive environment. We are proud to be an equal opportunity employer and do not discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment because of race, color, sex, age, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression, status as a veteran, basis of disability, or any other federal, state, or local protected class.