Engineering Intern - Python and Web (AI human in the loop)

Engineering Intern, Python + Web (AI-Augmented, Human-in-the-Loop)

Santa Monica, California

About Foodini

Foodini is a venture-backed dietary intelligence company working to make eating out safe for everyone. Thirty-three million Americans have a diagnosed food allergy. Count everyone living with intolerances and dietary preferences and that number reaches 173 million. For all of them, reading a menu is a risk assessment. Get it wrong and dinner can end in an emergency room.

Our platform helps restaurants, hotels, stadiums, and food-service operators get allergen data right at the ingredient level. Our engine, DietaryAI, reads menus and recipes, and every menu is then verified by registered dietitians, because with allergens, 90% correct is 100% wrong. That accuracy is what lets a parent, a celiac, or an anaphylaxis-risk guest order with confidence instead of fear.

The regulatory picture is moving fast, and it is driving real growth for us right now. California SB-68 took effect on July 1, 2026, requiring chains with 20 or more US locations to disclose the FDA Top 9 allergens on every menu item. Virginia's law landed the same day, New York's follows on November 1, and six more bills are in progress across New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Michigan, Illinois, and Missouri. Every one of those drafts applies to all restaurants, not just the large chains. Compliance is the floor. The revenue operators recover from dietary-restriction guests, who are high-value, high-loyalty, and badly underserved, is the ceiling.

We work with clients including Compass Group, Marriott Hotels, Hungry Howie's, José Andrés Group, Bartaco, Bluestone Lane, Saxbys, Sweetfin, and Areas USA, plus concessions at a Major League Baseball stadium. We cover 150+ allergies and dietary needs for 300,000+ consumers across the US and Australia. Forbes and Bloomberg have covered us, and Fast Company ranked us #9 in Restaurants, Dining & Food Services on its 2026 Most Innovative Companies list, in the top ten alongside DoorDash. Our founder has lived with celiac disease since 2002 and worked directly with the author of SB-68 on the legislative language, so the standard we hold ourselves to here is personal.

The role

Because we operate where allergens and diets meet real plates, accuracy is not negotiable. A wrong tag is a safety issue, not a cosmetic bug. Everything we build is quality-first, and that principle shapes how we adopt AI: aggressively, but always with human judgment holding the wheel.

Our stack, more than ten repositories spanning APIs, queues, and web and mobile interfaces, is being reworked to support significant organizational growth and to move to an agentic, AI-as-peer approach across the development lifecycle. You will help us get there, with AI as a core collaborator throughout delivery, and without loosening the rigor a dietary-safety product demands.

We are looking for someone who sees today's AI shift as a chance to change how software gets built, and who is equally clear that velocity can't come at the cost of correctness. You will be a key contributor in turning an existing, real-world codebase into a well-documented, well-tested, high-performance platform that humans and AI agents can both work in safely. The day-to-day spans backend APIs, asynchronous queue workers, and web front ends, with mobile in the mix, all increasingly AI-assisted or AI-driven, and all gated by human-led review.

The core of the job is finding the sweet spot between speed and safety: collaborating with the CTO and Lead Developer to push velocity through agentic tooling while keeping architecture, schema, and approach firmly human-led. We want someone who can drive an agent hard, then critically validate what it produced, and who knows the difference between "it ran" and "it's right."

Key tasks

AI-augmented delivery, end to end. Help extending our existing codebase using engineering first, AI and human in the loop approach. Documentation, architecture, automated testing, and CI/CD, using AI-assisted workflows with clear human quality and supervisory gates at every stage.

Build features across the stack. Develop and improve our Python APIs, queue workers, and React.js web interfaces, and contribute to our Flutter and React user-facing apps where needed, holding or improving quality and performance as you go.

Human-in-the-loop by design. Help define and tune the workflows, guardrails, and checkpoints that let agents move fast while keeping a human accountable for architecture, schema, and correctness, especially anywhere allergen or dietary logic is involved.

You will be

Using AI to help build the system-wide and repository-specific guidance files (coding standards, workflow rules, guardrails, repo functionality, build-system descriptions) that agents rely on across our 10+ repositories.

Using AI to create a comprehensive suite of automated tests for our Python and React.js repositories, raising our confidence floor before we accelerate.

Helping implement and tune the tools, skills, and workflows for a quality-focused AI-peer development environment, taking work from product specification through to deployment with multiple human-led quality gates.

Delivering real enhancements to schema, code, and infrastructure using all of the above, and learning where AI accelerates us and where a human has to stay in the loop.

Technical requirements

We care more about range and curiosity than years on a résumé. The spine of this role is Python and the web, so we expect strength in at least one of the first two below, real capability in another area, and a readiness to grow into the rest.

• Python / FastAPI / Pydantic. Building reliable, scalable APIs and the services and queues around them. (Core)
• Modern web (React.js / TypeScript). Delivering production web apps and admin tooling. (Core)
• Google Cloud Platform. Designing and managing cloud infrastructure.
• Terraform and DevOps. Infrastructure-as-code, Docker, CI/CD.
• GitHub CI/CD. Build, test, and deploy pipelines.
• Flutter / mobile. iOS, Android, and webapp delivery. A plus, given our mobile interfaces.

The AI mandate

You should be excited about an agentic, AI-first development future, and clear-eyed about its limits. We want someone who already uses AI-driven development tools, is eager to explore how agents improve productivity and reliability, and who pairs that instinctively with human-in-the-loop checkpoints. We are not handing the work to AI. We are building a system where humans and agents each do what they are best at.

Why Foodini

Impact. Build tools that solve real problems for people with complex dietary and allergy requirements, where getting it right genuinely matters.

Autonomy. Reasonable autonomy within a framework that rewards technical leadership and initiative.

Growth. Regular peer review and close collaboration with a CTO and Lead Developer who value continuous improvement and constructive feedback.

The details

This is a three-month internship, unpaid, with a weekly expense budget. Based in Santa Monica. Full-time or part-time both work, and we are looking to hire the right person at the end of it.