Internship Program

A partnership brochure for universities

01 / Where We Come From

Built by the team behind CareerOS

Sovrano AI was built by the same team that created CareerOS.

CareerOS had one job: get students placed at their dream companies. We got good at it. Then AI changed the rules. The companies students wanted to work for started scaling down junior hiring. Some roles disappeared entirely. Graduates kept increasing. Entry points kept shrinking.

Our mission didn't change. We still want students to get placed and succeed. But the path changed. A degree alone stopped being enough. Employers started asking for proof: Can you actually work with AI? Do you understand how these systems function? Can you contribute on day one?

So we built Sovrano AI. We connect university students with the AI labs building frontier models and give them real, paid work. Students do the human evaluation that makes AI systems safer and more accurate. They learn how these models are built. They earn money while doing it. AI labs get the expert human judgment their models need to improve.

That's the core of what we do. The internship program is how we bring it to universities.

02 / The Program

What is the Sovrano AI Internship?

The Sovrano AI Internship places MBA students, master's students, and advanced undergraduates into Sovrano AI's evaluation workforce. Students work on real tasks for real AI labs while learning the technical foundations of how AI systems are developed and evaluated.

The program has two parts.

Part 1

AI Education

Before students touch any live evaluation task, they go through structured training. They learn how large language models are built from the ground up: pre-training, fine-tuning, reinforcement learning from human feedback. They learn why human evaluation matters in the development pipeline, what good evaluation looks like, and how their judgments directly shape model behavior.

This isn't a lecture series. The training is built around the work they'll be doing, so concepts are immediately applied. Students finish with a working understanding of AI development that most professionals in adjacent fields don't have.

Part 2

AI Evaluation Work

This is the core of the internship. Students perform real evaluation tasks on production AI models:

  • RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback) Rating and comparing AI-generated responses to teach models which outputs are more helpful, accurate, and safe
  • Data annotation Labeling and categorizing training data that models learn from
  • Response re-ranking Evaluating multiple model outputs and ranking them by quality, relevance, and correctness

Students work on live projects from AI labs. The work is paid. It contributes directly to how the next generation of AI models is built.

03 / In Practice

How it works day to day

1

Weeks 1-2: Onboarding

Students complete the AI education module and get assigned a dedicated mentor. They learn evaluation tools, complete practice tasks with feedback, and get comfortable with the platform before any live work begins.

2

Daily Routine (Week 3 onward)

Each working day follows the same rhythm: roughly two hours of structured AI training and education, then the remaining hours on live evaluation work. Training covers how models are built, evaluation methodology, and domain-specific knowledge. The rest is real tasks: RLHF, annotation, re-ranking, matched to the student's academic background.

3

Active Mentoring

Every student has a dedicated mentor from the Sovrano AI team. Mentors run regular 1:1 sessions (weekly for full-time interns, bi-weekly for part-time), give feedback on evaluation quality, help with career questions, and make sure students are learning, not just producing. Mentors also report to the university when the internship is for credit.

4

End of Program

Students receive a performance review covering evaluation work and training completion. They also get a Sovrano AI certification and, for qualifying formats, a reference letter.

All work is remote-first. Students log hours through Sovrano AI's platform and receive regular feedback from mentors and project leads.

04 / Internship Formats

Three formats, three different experiences

A 10-hour-per-week internship looks different from a full-time summer position. The work is different, the deliverables are different, and the experience is different. Here's exactly what each format involves.

Part-Time Semester

10-15 hours/week alongside regular coursework. One full academic semester.

Students fit evaluation work around their existing schedule. Each week includes roughly two hours of AI training content plus 8-13 hours of live evaluation tasks. Tasks are self-contained and designed to be completed in focused blocks, so students can work in the mornings, evenings, or weekends depending on their coursework.

Project assignments are matched to academic background. A finance MBA student might evaluate AI-generated investment analyses. A law student might review legal reasoning outputs. The work reinforces what students are learning in class, not competing with it.

Schedule: Flexible, remote-first. Students choose when to work within weekly deadlines.

Mentoring: Dedicated mentor. Bi-weekly 30-min 1:1 sessions plus async feedback on task quality.

Deliverable: Evaluation portfolio documenting tasks completed, domains covered, and skills developed. Sovrano AI certification.

Compensation: Paid per task completed. Total depends on volume and complexity of work.

For-Credit Integration

Same scheduling as Format A or C, but structured to satisfy academic degree requirements.

This format adds a layer of academic rigor on top of either the Part-Time Semester or Summer Intensive. We work with your faculty before the internship starts to define learning outcomes, assessment milestones, and a capstone project that connects the evaluation work to the student's field of study.

Students complete the same evaluation tasks as other formats, but they also produce academic deliverables: bi-weekly progress reports, a mid-term review, and a final capstone. The capstone could be a research paper analyzing AI evaluation methodology, a case study on model behavior in a specific domain, or an applied analysis of how RLHF affects output quality in their area of expertise.

Academic Structure: Faculty-approved syllabus with defined learning outcomes, assessment criteria, and grading rubric.

Mentoring: Dedicated mentor with bi-weekly 1:1s. Mentor submits progress reports to faculty supervisor throughout.

Deliverable: Capstone project (research paper, case study, or applied analysis) + evaluation portfolio + Sovrano AI certification.

Assessment: Bi-weekly progress reports, mid-term review, final evaluation. All shared with the university.

Summer Intensive

35-40 hours/week during summer break. Typically 8-12 weeks.

The full immersion. Students work full-time on AI evaluation with a daily schedule that mirrors a real job: roughly two hours of structured training each morning (deeper and faster than the semester curriculum), then six to eight hours of live evaluation work.

Because of the volume, summer interns take on larger, multi-week evaluation projects. They contribute to model benchmarking studies and tackle more complex annotation tasks. They also go deeper into evaluation methodology: understanding inter-annotator agreement, calibration, and how their judgments are weighted in the training pipeline.

Schedule: Full-time, remote-first. Standard working hours with flexibility. Access to team stand-ups and project channels.

Mentoring: Dedicated mentor with weekly 1:1 sessions. Direct access to project leads and the broader Sovrano AI team.

Deliverable: Full evaluation portfolio + final presentation + Sovrano AI certification + detailed reference letter.

Compensation: Paid. Higher volume of work means higher total earnings over the program.

All three formats include: paid work, structured AI education, a dedicated mentor, a Sovrano AI certification, and coverage of every requirement for a curricular internship. The difference is depth, pace, and what students walk away with at the end.

05 / Why This Matters Now

The shift toward skill-based hiring

The hiring market has shifted. Employers are moving toward skill-based hiring. A degree from a top university still opens doors, but recruiters increasingly ask: What can you actually do?

AI literacy sits at the center of this shift. Companies across every industry are integrating AI into their operations. They need people who understand how these systems work, not just how to prompt them. People who can evaluate AI output critically. People who have worked on the models, not just read about them.

Most universities don't teach this yet. Not because they don't want to. The field is moving too fast for curriculum committees to keep up, and the hands-on work requires access to production AI systems that universities can't provide on their own.

That's the gap the Sovrano AI Internship fills. Your students get real work experience with real AI models. They get paid for it. They get a credential that says something specific. And your university gets to offer something that almost no one else is offering right now.

06 / Partnership

What we need from you

Setting up a partnership is straightforward.

  1. A point of contact. Typically someone in career services or a program coordinator who can help promote the internship to eligible students.
  2. Credit approval (if applicable). We provide a syllabus-equivalent document with learning outcomes, assessment criteria, and supervision details. Your faculty reviews it and decides if it qualifies for credit.
  3. Tripartite agreement. Each student signs an internship agreement between themselves, your university, and Sovrano AI. This covers mentorship, learning outcomes, assessments, and reporting.
  4. Student referrals. Once the partnership is active, you share the opportunity through your normal channels. Students apply through Sovrano AI's platform.

We handle everything else: onboarding, training, mentor assignment, project allocation, payment, scoring, and performance reviews. Every requirement of a curricular internship is covered.

Get started

Book a 15-minute partnership call with our team. We'll walk through the program, answer questions about credit integration, and figure out the right format for your university.

Book a Partnership Call
or email us at hello@sovrano.ai