---
title: 'Summer Intern - General Application at Valency Systems Inc.'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/summer-intern-general-application-valency-systems-inc-berkeley-7bqme1bjkyje'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-13'
---

# Summer Intern - General Application at Valency Systems Inc.

- **Company:** Valency Systems Inc.
- **Location:** Berkeley, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-10-01
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-13
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/valency/591341a7-dffa-4093-959f-e56236dde820

## Job description

## About Valency

Valency Systems is a small, dynamic team of engineers, scientists, and researchers building the global hub for the agentic research era. We're based in Berkeley, California, and we're building something that matters. If you care about open science, advancing research at the speed of thought, and using AI to accelerate discovery, we'd love to talk. As an intern, you'll be fully in-office 5 days a week over the summer — a great way to immerse yourself in the team and get the most out of your experience.

The Position: Summer Intern You'll join a small team, own a real project, and ship work that matters. Our interns aren't on the sidelines. You'll work directly with the people building Valency, learn fast, and leave with something you're proud to show. We hire interns across technical and non-technical areas. Tell us where you'd like to contribute:

- Engineering: Build features across the stack, improve our infrastructure, and ship to production.
- Research & Science: Work on problems in retrieval, evaluation, and how research is produced, cited, and trusted.
- Product & Design: Help shape how researchers and AI systems use our products. Talk to users, write specs, prototype.
- Business Operations: Help build the systems that keep a fast-growing company running, from people and hiring to compliance, finance, and office operations.
- Go-to-Market: Help bring our products to researchers and research teams through customer outreach, content, events, and community.

## What you'll do

- Work on a defined summer project with a clear goal and a mentor to guide you.
- Use AI tools to work faster and learn faster.
- Collaborate across teams. Ask questions. Share your work early.
- Present what you built at the end of the summer.
- Grow your skills while helping build the future of research infrastructure.

## Who you are

- You're a current undergraduate or graduate student, a recent graduate, or an SME in any field relevant to the area you're applying for.
- You're curious about AI and already use AI tools in your work or studies.
- You communicate clearly and are comfortable with ambiguity.
- You're a team player with a growth mindset.
- You're excited about open science and building infrastructure that advances human knowledge.

Show us your work We want to see what you've done. Depending on your area, that might be:

- GitHub repos or side projects
- Research papers, posters, or class projects
- A portfolio, writing samples, or something you organized or launched

Program details

- Dates: ~10–12 weeks, approx. June–August 2027; flexible start dates
- Hours: Full-time, 35-40 hours per week
- Location: Onsite, at our Berkeley HQ 5 days a week

## What You'll Get

You'll work alongside founders and senior team members, not in a silo. Ship real work that matters. Learn building a dynamic company to support open science and agentic research. Experience startup culture with learning sessions and cross-team exposure. You'll interact with interesting academics and researchers from across many disciplines.

Work Authorization Candidates must be legally authorized to work in the United States.

## About Valency Systems Inc.

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Valency Systems Inc. builds a people-centered, AI-accelerated research platform that connects frontier LLMs to tens of millions of scientific papers and preprints, enabling grounded Q&A and discovery.
- **Entity Type**: Private, venture-backed (stage not disclosed)
- **Headquarters**: Berkeley, California, USA (implied by founder affiliations and job postings)
- **Founded**: Not publicly disclosed (the company announced its public launch in mid-2026 via a "Hello World" blog post)
- **Founders**: Josh Bloom (CEO, Co-founder) and Ryan Anderson (COO, Co-founder)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: AI-powered scientific research infrastructure, SaaS/API for research discovery
- **Target customers**: Researchers in academia, national laboratories, government agencies, and industry R&D teams; also applicable to policymakers, investors, and science journalists
- **Mission or purpose**: To create a home for people-centered, AI-accelerated research—keeping AI grounded in the real scientific record, not hallucinations

## Products & Services
- **[Valency Bond](https://valency.io)**: A model context protocol (MCP) service that gives LLMs (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, etc.) structured access to an embeddings-indexed corpus of tens of millions of research papers and preprints (coverage from 1965 to present, updated within hours of publication). Includes semantic search, citation graph tools, and 37+ MCP tools for targeted queries, reading list generation, and collaboration discovery.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed (private company)
- **Key Metric – Total Funding**: Not disclosed, but confirmed as "backed by venture capital"
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Not named publicly; early users include researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and other national labs, academia, and industry
- **Growth Signals**: The company is actively hiring (multiple roles posted), has a public waitlist for Valency Bond, and has received early positive testimonials from senior scientists at LBNL. The platform indexes tens of millions of papers and grows daily.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Grounded in real research**: Valency Bond directly connects LLMs to the actual scientific record, eliminating hallucinations from outdated or fabricated citations.
- **Freshness**: Papers are indexed within hours of publication, not months or years—critical for fast-moving fields.
- **Token-efficient & fast**: Designed for low latency and high throughput, making it practical for LLM agents and interactive use.
- **Partnership with domain experts**: Built in collaboration with researchers at leading national laboratories, ensuring the tool meets real scientific workflows.

## Strategic Focus
- **Current priorities**: Expanding the Valency Bond platform, onboarding more institutional and individual users, and building out the team. The company is focused on enabling AI-accelerated discovery while keeping humans in the loop ("people-centered").
- **Direction for growth**: Likely targeting deeper integrations with LLMs, expanding coverage to more preprint servers and journals, and serving enterprise/government clients who need secure, on-premises versions.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture highlights**: A science-first, AI-forward startup co-founded by a UC Berkeley professor (astronomy/AI) and a former IBM CTO. Emphasis on human-centered design and rigorous grounding in research.
- **Remote/hybrid/office policy**: Not explicitly stated, but one job posting is for "AMER" (Americas) time zone and the company is based in Berkeley, suggesting a remote-friendly or hybrid model.
- **Notable perks or engineering culture**: Early-stage environment with direct impact on product direction; opportunity to work at the intersection of AI, scientific infrastructure, and user experience. The team is described as "wonderful and talented" and is actively growing.

## Sources
1. [valency.io](https://valency.io/)
2. [blog.valency.io/posts/hello-world/](https://blog.valency.io/posts/hello-world/)
3. [linkedin.com/posts/ryananderson_...](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ryananderson_big-news-ive-co-founded-a-startup-called-activity-7457858498870132736-F6Ce)
4. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/valency](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/valency)

## Other roles at Valency Systems Inc.

- [Community Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/community-manager-valency-systems-inc-berkeley-r0a67vx7ydz7) — Berkeley, CA
- [Software Engineer (Full-stack)](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-full-stack-valency-systems-inc-berkeley-12v2ctbxsja3) — Berkeley, CA
- [Technical Product Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/technical-product-manager-valency-systems-inc-berkeley-tt5twtphr4np) — Berkeley, CA
- [GTM Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/gtm-engineer-valency-systems-inc-berkeley-z0d9g2d5h8nz) — Berkeley, CA
- [Senior Software Engineer - Backend Systems](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-backend-systems-valency-systems-inc-berkeley-x270mrx6ck03) — Berkeley, CA
- [Open Application — Shape Your Role at Valency](https://feeny.ai/job/open-application-shape-your-role-at-valency-valency-systems-inc-berkeley-6b4e5hbtheja) — Berkeley, CA
- [Senior AI-Native DevOps / Operations Engineer (AMER)](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-ai-native-devops-operations-engineer-amer-valency-systems-inc-berkeley-rfy3bfvbyvt9) — Berkeley, CA
- [Head of Research](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-research-valency-systems-inc-berkeley-90ak2p6m36sw) — Berkeley, CA