Software Engineering Intern (Algorithm Engineering)

Who We AreQuest is building Southeast Asia's most trusted marketplace for local services. Our platform enables individuals and businesses to seamlessly hire gig workers across a wide range of service categories.We're on a mission to unlock local economic opportunities by making it easier, safer, and more efficient for people to connect and transact. Backed by top-tier investors including Goodwater Capital, Antler, and leading tech angels, Quest is scaling rapidly to redefine the local services economy.Job SummaryWe’re looking for a Software Engineering Intern who is excited about combining software development with cutting-edge AI to build meaningful, production-grade features. You will help bring to life intelligent tools that power Quest’s core platform, from recommendation engines to conversational agents, with a strong emphasis on building real applications with large language models (LLMs) and NLP.We are looking for talented individuals to join our fast-moving startup where your work directly shapes the user experience and business outcomes. If you're a builder with ML/NLP chops, passionate about experimentation, and excited by shipping real features to hundreds of thousands of users, we’d love to hear from you.What You'll DoBuild and iterate on Flask-based microservices that integrate LLMs to serve core app functionality.Use NLP techniques to encode text into embeddings for features like category tagging, semantic search, and similarity matching.Enhance our recommendation engine using LLMs, user behavior signals, and prior quest data.Conduct experiments with different prompt strategies and embedding models to improve output relevance.Collaborate closely with product and engineering teams to integrate AI services into the mobile app.Write clean, well-documented code and contribute to experimentation logs and technical decisions.You Might Be a Great Fit If YouHave hands-on experience building and deploying Python-based apps (e.g., Flask, FastAPI).Are comfortable working with LLM APIs (e.g., OpenAI, Gemini) and NLP libraries (e.g., Hugging Face Transformers, spaCy).Understand how to work with text embeddings (e.g., sentence-transformers, VertexAI Embeddings, PGVector).Know the basics of model evaluation, feature engineering, and data preprocessing.Curious, resourceful, and self-driven.Have experience in or exposure to startup environments (a big plus).Can commit for at least 3 months.Our Internship Period Options6 months Full-time from Jan’26 onwards (Preferred option)3 months part-time from Jan’26 onwards + 3 months full-time from June'26 onwards3 months part-time from Jan’26 onwards (Least preferred)If You're Keen To Join UsSend your resume and cover letter to matthew@quest-inc.co with the following details:Your availability (Full-time/Part-time), earliest start date, and duration of commitment.Why do you want to work at Quest.Your career goals and what drives your passion.