Applied AI Intern

Cape Town-Based | Scale-Up | 3-Month Contract | Jem Labs | Hiring Manager: Rob Gardner

Jem is hiring Applied AI Interns to ship real AI work from week one, not shadow someone else's.

Jem is a fast-growing HR tech scale-up building payroll, HR and benefits tools for frontline teams. We currently support just under 200,000 frontline employees across South Africa.

Inside Jem sits Jem Labs, our internal AI team. Labs engineers embed directly into a Jem machine (Sales, Customer Success, Product and so on) and rebuild how that part of the company works from the inside using AI. This isn't internal tooling as a chore. It's the thesis that every team in a modern company should have a technical person embedded in it, and you'd be one of the first people in the country hired explicitly to prove that.

This is for people who've been building things since before anyone paid them to.

⭐️ Your Mission

• Embed into a Jem machine and rebuild how it operates: take work that eats a team's week and get it down to an afternoon
• Build on Jem Brain, our internal intelligence layer, and Jem Mini, our new payroll product
• Run rapid prototypes that decide whether a product idea is worth committing to
• Ship a working frontend for whatever tool or demo you build, not just a backend that works on your machine
  
  

⭐️ What Success Looks Like

• You ship something real people use in your first week
• The work you do on a machine measurably cuts the time that team spends on a task
• You've moved comfortably across AI/ML engineering, product building and a bit of design because the work needed it
• By the end of the three months, you have a real case for being one of the best young applied AI engineers in the country
  
  

⭐️ What You'll Do

• Sit inside a Jem machine and work the problems that team actually has, not a simulated version of them
• Build and ship rapid prototypes that tell us fast whether a product idea is worth committing to
• Work on Jem Brain and Jem Mini directly
• Build clean, usable frontends for the tools and demos you produce
• Work on problems where nobody in the building knows the answer yet, using tooling that didn't exist eighteen months ago
  
  

⭐️ You'll Thrive Here If You

• Understand what's actually happening inside a model, not just how to call one: training, fine-tuning, evaluation, why a model fails and how you'd know
• Are technical first. We need fundamentals, not prompt engineering
• Are fast, confident and opinionated with Claude Code and coding agents
• Have a portfolio that proves it: side projects, shipped work, a repo you're proud of, ideally something you chased well past the point anyone was making you
• Have first-principles, mathematical instinct and tend to spot the constraint nobody else saw
• Can explain a hard technical decision simply, because you'll work with technical and non-technical colleagues alike
• Have high energy, genuine curiosity and are comfortable in ambiguity
  
  

⭐️ Requirements

Minimum:

• Real depth in AI and ML fundamentals, demonstrated through projects, research or coursework
• Strong general technical fundamentals beyond just using AI tools
• Fluent, fast use of Claude Code or similar coding agents
• Evidence of self-directed building: side projects, a portfolio or shipped work

Nice to have:

• A degree in computer science, AI/ML or a related field
• Prior exposure to a fast-moving product or startup environment
  
  

⭐️ What You Can Expect From Us

• A hybrid, flexible environment, but we expect you in our Cape Town office (12 Dreyer Street, Claremont) at least 4 days a week
• A R30,000 monthly stipend for the three-month contract
• Lunch provided 4 days a week when you're in the office, access to an EAP programme, and a MacBook Pro to work on
• Direct access to the founders and colleagues who will push you, and expect to be pushed back
• Do well, and there's a permanent role waiting at the end of the contract, along with a genuine claim to being one of the best young applied AI engineers in the country
• We respond to all applications. You can expect feedback on your application, even if we decide not to move forward.
  
  

When our customers thrive, thousands of South African employees get access to the benefits and security they deserve. If you're ready to help build the future of how companies care for their people, we'd love to have you apply.