Software Engineering Intern (Algorithm Engineering)

Who We Are

Quest 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 Summary

We'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 Do

• Build 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 You

• Have 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 Options

• 6 months Full-time from Apr/May'26 onwards (Preferred option)
• 3 months full-time from Apr/May'26 onwards + 3 months part-time from Jul/Aug'26 onwards
• 3 months full-time from Apr/May26 onwards

If You're Keen To Join Us

Send your resume and cover letter to [Confidential Information] 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.