Intern, Software Engineer - Perception

About Us

At Hayden AI, we are on a mission to harness the power of computer vision to transform the way transit systems and other government agencies address real-world challenges.

From bus lane and bus stop enforcement to transportation optimization technologies and beyond, our innovative mobile perception system empowers our clients to accelerate transit, enhance street safety, and drive toward a sustainable future.

About the Perception Team

Hayden AI's Perception Team develops and refines AI and algorithms that power the company's mobile enforcement systems, processing video and image data to detect traffic violations, parking infractions, and other urban compliance scenarios. The team works cross-functionally with cloud and device engineering to build and deploy perception pipelines that make decisions about the real world and create insights for our customers.

About the Role

As a Perception Engineering Intern at Hayden AI, you will contribute directly to the AI systems that power our mobile enforcement platform. You will work on computer vision and machine learning models that process real-world video and image data to detect traffic violations and urban compliance events.

This role sits at the intersection of machine learning, data, and real-world deployment. You may work on improving model accuracy, building or refining training datasets, evaluating edge cases, optimizing inference performance, or developing tooling to support perception pipelines across cloud and on-device environments.

You will not be working on side projects—you will own meaningful technical work that contributes to production systems. With guidance from a senior engineer, you’ll design experiments, implement improvements, test performance, and help ship enhancements that directly impact how our systems interpret and act on the physical world.

This internship is ideal for someone excited about applied AI—especially computer vision, model evaluation, and deploying ML systems beyond the lab into real-world environments.

This position is based in San Francisco and follows a hybrid schedule with at least 3 days in-office per week.

Key Responsibilities

Below are your primary responsibilities. These represent the core areas where you’ll make an impact. As part of a rapidly evolving team, we look forward to your impact expanding over time.

• Take ownership of a real project and see it through to completion

• Build and ship features with support from senior engineers

• Write clean, scalable code

• Test your work and iterate quickly

• Be involved in everything from design discussions to deployment

• Collaborate with engineers in code reviews and team discussions

• Participate in standups, sprint planning, and retrospectives

• Support the team on ad hoc engineering tasks as they come up

• Help improve performance, reliability, or usability where needed

• ​​Ask questions, seek feedback, and apply it quickly

Deliverables or project examples:

• GPS data analysis

• Train Deep learning model

• Create AI datasets

• Lidar/Camera data tooling

• Test cases for end-to-end system performance

• Develop a cloud service in the event processing pipeline

• Add page or a new user flow to the Portal web application

Required Qualifications

The qualifications below outline the experience and skills most relevant to success in this role. We recognize that skills and potential come in many forms, and we welcome diverse experiences that advance our mission.

• Education:

  • Currently enrolled in a Master’s or PhD program in Computer Science, Mechanical Engineering, or a related technical field.

• Technical Experience:

  • Experience in one or more of the following programming languages:

    • Python, C++

• Personal Attributes:

  • Detail-oriented with a high bar for quality and accuracy.

  • Curious and self-driven, motivated to dig into problems and find root causes.

  • Strong communicator who can clearly document findings and surface issues to the right stakeholders.

  • Collaborative team player who thrives in cross-functional environments.

  • Organized and reliable, with the ability to manage multiple tasks and follow through consistently.

  • Comfortable with ambiguity and able to make progress with limited direction.