AI-Agent Development Co-op

Number of Position(s): 1 Duration: 6 - 12 months Dates: January 2027 - June 2027 - December 2027 Location: Onsite in San Jose, CA Educational Requirements Currently a candidate for a master's degree or PhD in computer science, software engineering, artificial intelligence / machine learning, computer engineering, electrical engineering, or a related field with an accredited school in the US. What You Will Learn: This Co-Op position is an engineering-facing experience building AI agents for the optical test organization. You will gain practical knowledge in: AI Agent Design: How to design, prompt, evaluate, and harden agent workflows (skills, tools, and guardrails) that engineers actually use in daily ODVT work. Tooling and Integrations: Connecting agents to engineering systems - issue tracking, documentation, source control, and test data - so they fetch facts instead of inventing them. Test Engineering Context: How Optical Design Verification Testing works: test plans, test cases and lab data Software Craft: Python development, version control, structured documentation, tests, and iterating on tools from engineer feedback. Fiber Communication Exposure: High-speed coherent optical products, DSP concepts, and how test data is used to judge product performance and reliability. Proficiency in Python (preferred); additional programming or scripting languages welcome. Coursework or project experience with LLMs, AI agents, prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), or similar. Comfort with Git and collaborative software development. Ability to write clear technical documentation and explain a technical design to non-software engineers. Interest in applying AI to a real engineering team, with a skeptical eye toward correctness - not only academic demos. Nice to have Experience with Cursor, VS Code agent/copilot workflows, Model Context Protocol (MCP), or similar IDE-native AI tooling. Familiarity with Jira, Confluence, and Git/Bitbucket (or GitHub). Basic understanding of fiber optical communication systems, Digital Signal Processing (DSP), or lab/test data analysis. Demonstrated attention to detail and strong problem-solving capabilities. Ability to work effectively both independently and as part of a collaborative team. Excellent written and verbal communication skills.