Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence Intern
Hippo Harvest is looking for a highly motivated and creative graduate student for a paid internship to develop artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques to better understand plant health and optimize plant growth in an industrial-scale greenhouse environment. This exciting role will integrate multi-modal plant imaging with highly-detailed environmental conditions each plant experiences. Interns will be able to work with Hippo Harvest’s growers, scientists, and roboticists to drive new ways to gather data, improve growing conditions, and manage plant health at-scale. Interns will be able to work in state-of-art, highly automated greenhouses to see the impact of their algorithms and code in the real world.
Company overview
In a world increasingly impacted by climate change, pollution, and population growth, conventional production of fresh vegetables is unsustainable. Compared to field production, greenhouse hydroponic methods use 90% less water, increase yields, reduce food waste, use fewer pesticides, eliminate fertilizer runoff, and allow crops to be grown locally. However, greenhouse producers make up only a small part of today’s market due to high capital/labor costs and operational complexity. To close this gap, Hippo Harvest designs hydroponic grow systems from the ground up for simplicity, robotic automation, and machine learning to build sustainable, economical, and scalable production systems of the future.
Location: Remote or Hybrid with occasional travel to onsite locations in San Mateo County, California, USA
Timeline: 3 months, June-August in Summer 2026
Key responsibilities:
- Develop and deploy sophisticated machine learning models of plant health, environmental data, and plant images.
- Build artificial intelligence models and tools to summarize, analyze, and optimize plant growth across all of our automated greenhouses.
- Work cross-functionally across Hippo Harvest to identify ways to improve growing methods learned from data analysis
Qualifications:
- Currently enrolled PhD Student in Applied Math, Computer Science, Computational Biology, Robotics, Statistics, Machine Learning, or a related field
- Experience with modern deep learning (Pytorch, Tensorflow) and machine learning (sklearn, statsmodels, XGboost) frameworks
- Proficiency in Python and experience analyzing data with numpy/scipy/pytorch, pandas, matplotlib, or similar libraries.
Hippo Harvest is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status or disability status.