HDS Software Development Intern, Fall
Salary Range: $36,469.00 - 36,469.00
Closing Date: 6/26/2025
Job Summary:
The Office of the Chief Administrative Officer (CAO) provides operations support services and business solutions to the community of 10,000 House Members, Officers and staff. The CAO organization comprises more than 650 technical and administrative staff working in a variety of areas, including information technology, finance, budget management, human resources, payroll, child care, food and vending, procurement, logistics and administrative counsel.
Established in January 2022, the CAO’s House Digital Service (HDS) helps solve the unique technology challenges experienced by Member, Committee, and Leadership offices in Congress. From application design and development to data analysis and identifying the latest technological solutions, HDS's mission is to make sure the People’s House is working efficiently for the American people.
HDS interns will assist the small and agile HDS team in their work, including research, design, implementation, coding, and testing of various technology solutions for congressional offices. HDS interns will learn what it's like to work with a modern, agile, user-focused, transparent, and collaborative development team.
* paid at an annual rate of $36,469 not to exceed 120 days
** The CAO standard business hours are 8:30 a.m.- 5:30 p.m. Monday through Friday. This is a full-time, 40-hour-per-week internship that will require onsite attendance in Washington, D.C.
The position does not have day-to-day supervisory/managerial responsibilities
Primary Duties/Responsibilities:
- Design and build rapid prototypes of AI-driven web applications to demonstrate feasibility and value
- Integrate AI tools and libraries into existing web application products by building dashboards, chatbots, or backend components
- Explore large language models and other tools for tasks like text generation, summarization, chat interfaces
- Connect web chat clients to internal data sources by customizing Model Context Protocol (MCP) configurations
- Evaluating the effectiveness and validity of ML product outputs (accuracy, precision, recall, etc.)
- Conduct research on foundational and emerging ML/NLP methodologies, and provide strategic guidance to the team on optimizing key configuration parameters—including vector similarity metrics, decoding strategies, embedding dimensionality, and tokenization limits for improved performance and scalability in applied AI systems.
- Performs other official duties as assigned.
Minium Qualifications
- Currently pursuing an undergraduate degree in a technical or quantitative discipline, including computer science or a related field
- Candidates should demonstrate interest and/or experience in public service
- Candidates must be a team player and possess a high level of attention to detail.
- Candidates must possess a willingness to take initiative, generate creative ideas, and work under deadline pressure.
Preferred Qualifications
Preference given to recent college graduates or those soon-to-graduate who have demonstrated expertise in AI/ML development for the web, including any of the following:
- Natural Language Processing, tokenization, anonymization, embeddings, sentiment analysis, vector similarity search, Model Context Protocol
- Front-end, back-end, and full-stack engineering with tools such as Javascript, Node.js, React, Python
- An ability to communicate complex technical concepts to non-technical audiences
Continued employment is contingent upon satisfactorily completing a criminal history records check (or other applicable security clearance) and a pre-employment drug-test (pre-identified position only).