Project NANDA Fellowship Program
Early Career AI Fellow
Work directly under a Research Fellow, contributing to real infrastructure that gets presented at events and feeds into published research
Position overview
Project NANDA (Networked Agents and Decentralized AI) is an initiative led by Prof. Ramesh Raskar, building the foundational infrastructure for an Internet of AI Agents. The core problem: the existing internet was designed for humans. DNS resolves domain names typed by people. HTTP serves documents to browsers. PKI authenticates websites for users clicking padlocks. None of it handles billions of autonomous agents that need to discover each other, verify capabilities, and transact in milliseconds — without a human in the loop.
You'll be working directly under a Research Fellow, contributing to real infrastructure that gets presented at events and feeds into published research. This isn't an internship with busy-work — you'll be writing code that runs in production and building things that matter.
The scope is more defined than our other fellow roles. You'll have a senior person to check in with, clearer tasks to start from, and room to grow into more ownership over time. What we need from you is the ability to pick something up fast, execute cleanly, and ask good questions when you're stuck.
What you'll do
- Feature development and bugfixes on NEST and surrounding tooling, under guidance from a Research Fellow
- Building small demos, integrations, and internal tools as needed
- Writing tests, documentation, and the unglamorous-but-necessary parts of good software
- Pair-building with senior fellows on bigger problems — you'll learn a lot by being in the room
- Gradually taking on more ownership as you build context and trust
Expertise you may have
- No YoE requirement. You could be a final-year student, a bootcamp grad, or someone who's been self-teaching for a year. We don't care about the path — we care that you can write code, use your tools well, and show up with curiosity.
- Solid grasp of the basics in at least one language — you understand functions, data structures, how programs run, what an API is
- You use Git. Commits, branches, PRs — this is non-negotiable
- You actively use a vibe coding platform — Cursor, Claude Code, or equivalent. We want people who've made AI-assisted development part of how they work, not a novelty they tried once
- Some exposure to developer tooling — you've worked with a terminal, read error logs, debugged something that wasn't working
- You ask questions when you're stuck rather than spinning for hours — but you try first
- You're hungry to learn. This environment moves fast and rewards people who absorb quickly
Bonus
- You've built something and shipped it — a side project, an open-source contribution, anything real
- Exposure to web development, APIs, or backend basics
- Any experience with AI tools beyond vibe coding — prompting, building simple LLM-powered things, anything agentic
- You've read about what NANDA is building and have thoughts on it
Communication & collaboration
- Strong written and verbal communication skills
- Willingness to give and receive feedback in code reviews and group sessions
- Reliability in a remote-first team rhythm
Apply now