AI Manufacturing Intelligence Intern

About us: Based in Berkeley, CA, UPSIDE Foods grows meat, poultry, and seafood directly from real animal cells. These products are not vegan or vegetarian—they are delicious meat, made without the need to raise and slaughter billions of animals. In doing so, the company aims to address some of the most pressing environmental, animal welfare, and public health challenges, while still giving people the meat they love.    Founded as the world’s first cultivated meat company in 2015, UPSIDE Foods (formerly Memphis Meats) has achieved numerous industry-defining milestones, including being the first company to produce multiple species of meat (beef, chicken, and duck) and to sell a cultivated meat product in the United States. The company believes that people shouldn’t have to choose between the foods they love and a thriving planet, and is working to build a better food system with access to delicious, humane, and sustainable meat, poultry, and seafood.    UPSIDE Foods has won various industry awards, including New York Times’ Good Tech Awards, FastCo’s Next Big Thing in Tech and World Changing Ideas Awards, and the Best and Brightest Companies to Work For in the Nation by the National Association for Business Resources. UPSIDE Foods has raised a total of $608 million, including from the Abu Dhabi Growth Fund (ADG), Baillie Gifford, Bill Gates, Cargill, John Doerr, John Mackey, Kimbal and Christiana Musk, Norwest, Richard Branson, Softbank, Temasek, Threshold, Tyson Foods, and others.   About this job: At UPSIDE Foods, we’re turning the promise of cultivated meat into a delicious, nutritious reality – and to enable our scaled manufacturing, we’re building a Manufacturing Intelligence platform for the future of food. As an ML/AI Intern on this team, you’ll join a tight‑knit team with a data scientist, bioprocess engineers, and IT & software developers who transform torrents of real‑time bioreactor signals into actionable insights. Your summer will be spent crafting soft sensors, interpretable models, and interactive dashboards that span everything from 250 mL benchtop reactors to thousands-of-liter vessels, giving our scientists the clarity they need to fine‑tune cell growth, flavor, and yield. You’ll build on the group’s early modelling efforts and see your work deployed in our EPIC facility in Emeryville where we’re writing the next chapter of food history. Day‑to‑day, you’ll mine millions of time‑series data points for hidden predictors, engineer robust pipelines in Python and SQL, and prototype neural networks (think temporal convolutional nets and attention‑based RNNs) in PyTorch. You’ll partner with biologists to ensure your features honor metabolic reality, iterate with manufacturing engineers to push models across scales, and ship crisp visualizations that make complex kinetics intuitive for non‑experts. If you’re comfortable translating raw sensor streams into production‑ready algorithms—and you’re excited to learn the quirks of mammalian cell culture along the way—this internship will give you a front‑row seat to how AI accelerates the future of sustainable protein.   Responsibilities include:

• Explore our MFG data landscape in search of predictive data and insights.
• Design and implement ML/AI workflows from data preprocessing to prediction.
• Develop models applicable across different bioreactor scales.
• Analyze real-time bioreactor and cellular data to optimize manufacturing processes.
• Create dashboards to visualize model results and insights.
• Collaborate with stakeholders to provide updates and refine models.

About you:

• Proficiency in ML/AI, particularly time-series neural networks and hybrid modeling.
• Experience with time-series data analysis.
• Familiarity with bioprocessing and cell biology concepts.
• Strong coding skills in Python and SQL.
• Experience with PyTorch; dashboard visualization skills are desired but not required.

Who you’ll work with:

• Our Enterprise Intelligence team and partners, who’ve instrumented our manufacturing and R&D data, steward our data lake, and design models.
• Bioprocess and cellular‑biology engineers and manufacturing staff who will translate model outputs and visualizations into real‑world operations and interventions that boost cell growth, flavor, and yield.
• Cross‑functional R&D partners in analytics, product, and sensory science who rely on your insights to shape the next generation of cultivated meat.

Length of internship: 10 weeks   Compensation Range: $20/hr - $25/hr*
*Pay may vary depending on factors including job-related knowledge and skills.   UPSIDE Foods is an equal opportunity employer and we value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. Our company-wide mission is to create a product for everyone, so we are deeply committed to having teams and leaders that reflect this mission.