Junior AI Software Engineer

Internship in Ghent for a final-year software student who already builds with AI tools, shipping real client work alongside the founders.

About the role

Ghent, Belgium · Office-first · Internship · Three to six months, start date flexible

We are looking for a junior engineer on internship who wants to learn how a product actually gets built and shipped to paying clients. You will work in the room with the founders, in the real codebase, on work that reaches clients in the weekly release.

About NextSDS

Companies that handle chemicals carry a heavy compliance load. Every chemical product comes with a Safety Data Sheet, the document that sets out what is in it and how to handle it safely, and a typical company has thousands of them to keep accurate as regulations change. Most teams still manage this with spreadsheets and outside consultants, and many still fail audits.

NextSDS removes that burden. Clients send in their safety data sheets, and the platform organises them, keeps them current against the regulations that apply, flags restricted substances and regulatory changes, and produces the safety and risk documentation that used to be prepared by hand. The hard part is underneath: every supplier writes a sheet differently and every country reads the rules differently, and turning that fragmented data into something clean enough to drive guidance is a long-term R&D effort, not a feature to be finished.

We are a seed-stage company in Ghent, founded in 2024, backed by KBC Start it and imec.istart, and we recently closed a €1M round to execute this plan. The codebase is built by three senior founder developers on solid foundations: CI, GitHub, database backups and collaborative programming.

We take on interns because the work is genuinely interesting to learn on, document extraction, LLM pipelines, regulatory data at scale, and because we would rather meet good engineers early than compete for them later.

What you will do

You start with small, real tickets in the client-facing application: bug fixes, interface work, small features that go out with the weekly release. Nothing is parked in a sandbox project that gets thrown away when you leave.

Once you know your way around, you pick up a project of your own, scoped together with a founder, something you can point at when you are done. Past-shaped examples: an extraction step in the regulatory pipeline, an internal tool the team uses every day, or an evaluation harness that tells us whether a model change made output better or worse.

You will also see the parts of the job that school does not cover: code review, CI, migrations against real data, and a client who needs something on Friday afternoon.

If you are doing a thesis or a bachelor’s project, we are glad to shape the work around it, and we handle the school paperwork and the internship agreement.

What we are looking for

• Final-year bachelor or master in software engineering, computer science or similar
• You write TypeScript or Python on your own, and you can read code you did not write
• You already use AI coding tools daily, and you have opinions on where they help and where they get in the way
• Some grounding in databases and APIs. React, Astro or Node is a plus, not a requirement
• You try first, then ask, and you say clearly when you are stuck
• Curiosity about the data underneath: REACH, CLP, and supplier PDFs that never look the same twice
• Dutch or English is fine for working with the team

Why join NextSDS

• You ship to real clients in your first weeks
• You sit with the founders, with no layer and no queue of handed-down tickets
• AI tools such as Claude Code and Cursor are how this team builds, so you learn the workflow while it is still being figured out
• We work together in the room, in Ghent
• Work that decides how well companies across Europe keep people safe around chemicals
• If it works out on both sides, we would rather keep you than start a search from scratch

Hiring process

Two steps:

• An informal conversation with the founders
• A short technical chat about something you built, with the code in front of us

Interested?

Tell us about yourself, mention this role, and send along anything you have built. We will respond within a few days.

Interested in this role?

Get in touch via our contact form. Mention the role you're applying for and we'll get back to you within a few days.

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