AI Jobs for OPT Students
AI jobs on OPT are widely available across tech, research, and enterprise sectors, but your 90-day unemployment limit means you can't afford a slow search. Many AI roles at larger companies qualify for STEM OPT extension, giving you up to three years of work authorization without an H-1B.
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Get Access To All JobsABOUT SNORKEL
At Snorkel, we believe meaningful AI doesn’t start with the model, it starts with the data. We’re on a mission to help enterprises transform expert knowledge into specialized AI at scale. The AI landscape has gone through incredible changes between 2015, when Snorkel started as a research project in the Stanford AI Lab, to the generative AI breakthroughs of today. But one thing has remained constant: the data you use to build AI is the key to achieving differentiation, high performance, and production-ready systems. We work with some of the world’s largest organizations to empower scientists, engineers, financial experts, product creators, journalists, and more to build custom AI with their data faster than ever before. Excited to help us redefine how AI is built? Apply to be the newest Snorkeler!
As an Applied AI Engineer (Pre-Sales), you will partner closely with Sales and our AI Solution Practice Leaders during pre-sales engagements. You will lead technical discovery and solution scoping to identify high-value use cases, and develop tailored demos and pilots that demonstrate how modern GenAI and machine learning techniques can drive measurable business outcomes. You will also translate proposed solutions into clearly scoped, technically sound proposals and Statement of Works (SOWs) that set realistic expectations and position engagements for success, while collaborating with delivery teams during initial implementation. This role sits at the intersection of deep technical problem-solving and customer partnership. You will help customers unpack complex business challenges, quickly prototype solutions, and clearly communicate technical approaches to both engineering teams and senior business stakeholders. From early architecture discussions to demo development, you will play a key role in helping organizations adopt AI effectively while surfacing field insights that inform our product and research roadmap.
MAIN RESPONSIBILITIES
- Partner closely with Sales and our AI Solution Practice Leaders to shape technical strategy across active prospects, win technical evaluations, and ensure a seamless transition to post-sales delivery through structured handoff documentation and clear expectation alignment.
- Lead structured technical discovery engagements with prospects to understand business objectives, success criteria, data landscape, architectural constraints, security considerations, and organizational readiness.
- Translate discovery findings into well-defined GenAI solution architectures that demonstrate technical feasibility and business impact using internal frameworks, and complementary third-party technologies.
- Design, build and deliver bespoke demos, including evaluation pipelines, dataset strategy, retrieval-augmented generation systems, fine-tuning workflows, prompt engineering strategies, and agentic architectures tailored to specific customer use cases and senior business stakeholders.
- Author and contribute to custom proposals, including Statements of Work and RFP/RFI responses, ensuring scope clarity, architectural soundness, realistic effort estimates, and alignment with delivery capabilities.
- Systematically capture reusable patterns from bespoke demos and evolve them into reference architectures, demo assets, benchmarks, and internal solution playbooks.
- Annual travel up to 25%.
BASIC QUALIFICATIONS
- B.S. in Computer Science, Engineering, Math/Statistics, or equivalent experience.
- 5+ years in customer-facing technical roles (pre-sales, solutions engineering, or applied AI), including discovery, scoping, demos, proof-of-value engagements, and RFP responses.
- Hands-on Python experience and familiarity with the modern Gen AI stack - LLM ecosystems, RAG, vector databases, data processing, synthetic dataset curation, evaluation workflows, LLM orchestration and agent authoring tools.
- Expertise across the predictive ML stack, including classical ML (e.g., scikit-learn) and data processing frameworks (e.g., pandas, Spark).
- Ability to operate in fast-paced environments and rapidly build prototypes (ML solutions, RAG systems, prompt-based workflows, fine-tuned models, agentic systems) that demonstrate business value.
- Able to translate ambiguous business problems into testable technical approaches and measurable success criteria.
- Strong presentation and storytelling skills with the ability to engage both technical and executive audiences with credibility.
- Experience estimating scope and producing technical content for proposals and Statements of Work.
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS
- Compensation range is $190K - $330K OTE. All offers also include equity in the form of employee stock options. Our compensation ranges are determined by role, level, and location. Within the range, individual pay is determined by work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training.
LOCATIONS
New York; San Francisco Bay Area; Austin; Dallas; Seattle; Atlanta; Nashville; Boston; Remote - US
SALARY RANGE
$190,000—$330,000 USD
BE YOUR BEST AT SNORKEL
Joining Snorkel AI means becoming part of a company that has market proven solutions, robust funding, and is scaling rapidly—offering a unique combination of stability and the excitement of high growth. As a member of our team, you’ll have meaningful opportunities to shape priorities and initiatives, influence key strategic decisions, and directly impact our ongoing success. Whether you’re looking to deepen your technical expertise, explore leadership opportunities, or learn new skills across multiple functions, you’re fully supported in building your career in an environment designed for growth, learning, and shared success.
Snorkel AI is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity employer and is committed to building a team that represents a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and skills. Snorkel AI embraces diversity and provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment. Snorkel AI prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type on the basis of race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local law. All employment is decided on the basis of qualifications, performance, merit, and business need.
We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please contact us to request accommodation.
ABOUT SNORKEL
At Snorkel, we believe meaningful AI doesn’t start with the model, it starts with the data. We’re on a mission to help enterprises transform expert knowledge into specialized AI at scale. The AI landscape has gone through incredible changes between 2015, when Snorkel started as a research project in the Stanford AI Lab, to the generative AI breakthroughs of today. But one thing has remained constant: the data you use to build AI is the key to achieving differentiation, high performance, and production-ready systems. We work with some of the world’s largest organizations to empower scientists, engineers, financial experts, product creators, journalists, and more to build custom AI with their data faster than ever before. Excited to help us redefine how AI is built? Apply to be the newest Snorkeler!
As an Applied AI Engineer (Pre-Sales), you will partner closely with Sales and our AI Solution Practice Leaders during pre-sales engagements. You will lead technical discovery and solution scoping to identify high-value use cases, and develop tailored demos and pilots that demonstrate how modern GenAI and machine learning techniques can drive measurable business outcomes. You will also translate proposed solutions into clearly scoped, technically sound proposals and Statement of Works (SOWs) that set realistic expectations and position engagements for success, while collaborating with delivery teams during initial implementation. This role sits at the intersection of deep technical problem-solving and customer partnership. You will help customers unpack complex business challenges, quickly prototype solutions, and clearly communicate technical approaches to both engineering teams and senior business stakeholders. From early architecture discussions to demo development, you will play a key role in helping organizations adopt AI effectively while surfacing field insights that inform our product and research roadmap.
MAIN RESPONSIBILITIES
- Partner closely with Sales and our AI Solution Practice Leaders to shape technical strategy across active prospects, win technical evaluations, and ensure a seamless transition to post-sales delivery through structured handoff documentation and clear expectation alignment.
- Lead structured technical discovery engagements with prospects to understand business objectives, success criteria, data landscape, architectural constraints, security considerations, and organizational readiness.
- Translate discovery findings into well-defined GenAI solution architectures that demonstrate technical feasibility and business impact using internal frameworks, and complementary third-party technologies.
- Design, build and deliver bespoke demos, including evaluation pipelines, dataset strategy, retrieval-augmented generation systems, fine-tuning workflows, prompt engineering strategies, and agentic architectures tailored to specific customer use cases and senior business stakeholders.
- Author and contribute to custom proposals, including Statements of Work and RFP/RFI responses, ensuring scope clarity, architectural soundness, realistic effort estimates, and alignment with delivery capabilities.
- Systematically capture reusable patterns from bespoke demos and evolve them into reference architectures, demo assets, benchmarks, and internal solution playbooks.
- Annual travel up to 25%.
BASIC QUALIFICATIONS
- B.S. in Computer Science, Engineering, Math/Statistics, or equivalent experience.
- 5+ years in customer-facing technical roles (pre-sales, solutions engineering, or applied AI), including discovery, scoping, demos, proof-of-value engagements, and RFP responses.
- Hands-on Python experience and familiarity with the modern Gen AI stack - LLM ecosystems, RAG, vector databases, data processing, synthetic dataset curation, evaluation workflows, LLM orchestration and agent authoring tools.
- Expertise across the predictive ML stack, including classical ML (e.g., scikit-learn) and data processing frameworks (e.g., pandas, Spark).
- Ability to operate in fast-paced environments and rapidly build prototypes (ML solutions, RAG systems, prompt-based workflows, fine-tuned models, agentic systems) that demonstrate business value.
- Able to translate ambiguous business problems into testable technical approaches and measurable success criteria.
- Strong presentation and storytelling skills with the ability to engage both technical and executive audiences with credibility.
- Experience estimating scope and producing technical content for proposals and Statements of Work.
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS
- Compensation range is $190K - $330K OTE. All offers also include equity in the form of employee stock options. Our compensation ranges are determined by role, level, and location. Within the range, individual pay is determined by work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training.
LOCATIONS
New York; San Francisco Bay Area; Austin; Dallas; Seattle; Atlanta; Nashville; Boston; Remote - US
SALARY RANGE
$190,000—$330,000 USD
BE YOUR BEST AT SNORKEL
Joining Snorkel AI means becoming part of a company that has market proven solutions, robust funding, and is scaling rapidly—offering a unique combination of stability and the excitement of high growth. As a member of our team, you’ll have meaningful opportunities to shape priorities and initiatives, influence key strategic decisions, and directly impact our ongoing success. Whether you’re looking to deepen your technical expertise, explore leadership opportunities, or learn new skills across multiple functions, you’re fully supported in building your career in an environment designed for growth, learning, and shared success.
Snorkel AI is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity employer and is committed to building a team that represents a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and skills. Snorkel AI embraces diversity and provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment. Snorkel AI prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type on the basis of race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local law. All employment is decided on the basis of qualifications, performance, merit, and business need.
We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please contact us to request accommodation.
How to Get Visa Sponsorship in AI
Target STEM-designated programs first
Your F-1 degree field determines STEM OPT eligibility. Computer science, data science, and electrical engineering are all STEM-designated. Confirm your CIP code with your DSO before applying so you know your actual authorization window.
Prioritize employers enrolled in E-Verify
STEM OPT extension requires your employer to be enrolled in E-Verify. Ask recruiters early in the process. Large tech companies are almost universally enrolled, but startups vary and you need to confirm before accepting an offer.
Frame your research experience in product terms
AI hiring managers want engineers who ship, not just researchers who publish. Translate your thesis or lab work into product outcomes: model accuracy improvements, inference latency reductions, or dataset scale. Concrete metrics move you past resume screens.
Apply before your OPT start date approaches
Background checks and onboarding at larger companies routinely take four to six weeks. Start your search at least three months before your current authorization expires. Cutting it close creates gaps that are difficult to resolve without jeopardizing your status.
Understand the 90-day unemployment rule across roles
Part-time AI consulting or contract work counts toward employment under OPT, but unpaid research does not. If you take a short-term contract between full-time roles, track those days carefully. Your DSO can help you calculate cumulative unemployment accurately.
Match your job title to your degree field
USCIS scrutinizes whether your role is directly related to your degree. A software engineering title is harder to connect to a biology degree than an AI research title is. Work with your DSO to document the connection before your employer files the I-983.
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Get Access To All JobsFrequently Asked Questions
Can I work in AI on standard OPT before applying for the STEM extension?
Yes. Standard OPT gives you 12 months of work authorization after graduation, and AI roles qualify as long as the position is directly related to your degree field. If your degree is STEM-designated, you can apply for the 24-month STEM extension before your standard OPT expires, giving you up to three years total.
What AI job titles are most likely to qualify for STEM OPT extension?
Roles with titles like machine learning engineer, AI research scientist, data scientist, computer vision engineer, and NLP engineer consistently qualify when tied to a STEM degree. The title itself matters less than the job duties and degree connection. Your employer will document the relationship on Form I-983, so the role description needs to clearly reflect your field of study.
Where can I find AI employers who are open to hiring OPT students?
Migrate Mate is built specifically for F-1 OPT and international students, with AI jobs filtered by sponsorship willingness and E-Verify status. Searching there saves significant time compared to filtering through general job boards that don't surface work authorization details upfront.
Does contract or freelance AI work count as valid OPT employment?
Yes, self-employment and contract work are permitted under OPT as long as the work is directly related to your degree. You must work at least 20 hours per week to avoid accruing unemployment days. For STEM OPT, self-employment is technically allowed but the I-983 training plan requirement makes it complex to fulfill in practice.
What happens if my AI job offer falls through while I'm on OPT?
You have 90 cumulative days of unemployment allowed during standard OPT, and an additional 60 days during the STEM extension. If a job offer falls through, notify your DSO immediately and begin searching again. Days accrue from your OPT start date regardless of whether you were actively employed, so timing matters significantly.
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