An Unconventional Apprenticeship for an Unconventional Candidate
AI Implementation Apprentice (Entry-Level, Onsite, One-Year Program)
Location: Eliot, Maine (100% onsite, not remote, not hybrid)
Schedule: Full-time
Program length: One-year structured apprenticeship, with continued full-time employment expected on successful completion.
Compensation: Entry-level starting wage, with structured progression tied to demonstrated skill development at 3, 6, and 12-month milestones.
Who you’ll work with: Direct mentorship from our Chief of Staff (primary mentor) and our Founder (secondary mentor), on real initiatives across the company.
Work authorization: Must be authorized to work in the United States. We welcome OPT candidates and can support standard and STEM OPT. We do not sponsor H-1B visas.
About This Role
We’ve found that AI has unlocked an enormous number of ways to make our business better, in marketing, operations, customer experience, fulfillment, product, finance, and everything in between. The ideas are no longer the bottleneck. Execution is.
This apprenticeship is how we’re solving that. We’re hiring someone we can train from the ground up, and we expect this to be the first of many. You won’t be siloed in one department. You’ll work directly with our founder and chief of staff, pair with the people who know the work, and learn how to turn “we should probably try AI for this” into something that’s built, documented, and running.
This is a generalist role. Your job is to learn quickly, ask good questions, and get things done. We’ll teach you how.
Who We’re Looking For
We care far more about character than credentials. The most important things to us are:
- You’re a person of character who will fit our team and treat coworkers with respect.
- You have a strong work ethic, with a track record of showing up and doing what you said you’d do, in any context (school, a job, a sport, a side project, a volunteer role). We don’t care where.
- You’re a fast learner and a generalist, comfortable being a beginner in new areas.
- You’ve been experimenting with AI on your own. Not as an expert, but out of genuine curiosity. Even if it started with schoolwork, you’ve tried things, formed opinions, and didn’t wait for someone to tell you to.
- You can write and speak clearly, and you follow through on what you take on.
- You’re dependable, organized, and proactive.
A college degree is not required. Recent high school graduates, current and recent community college students, and people taking a nontraditional path are all welcome. Show us who you are.
What You’ll Do
Your work will progress over the year as your skills develop. The arc looks like this:
Quarter 1, Foundations. Learn the business end to end. Spend time in shipping, production, purchasing, and customer service. Get fluent with our products, our software, our writing standards, and how we use AI tools. Build the base.
Quarter 2, Execution. Begin contributing to product content, marketing operations, customer knowledge support, and reporting under close supervision. Start documenting what works.
Quarter 3, Improvement. Help map and improve internal workflows. Identify automation and AI-assisted opportunities. Build small, reliable tools, templates, and checklists that make recurring tasks easier.
Quarter 4, Ownership. Lead a capstone project that creates measurable value for the business. Present it to the team. Then keep going.
Throughout the year, you’ll use tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini to draft, summarize, reformat, research, and automate. You’ll clean up, organize, and tag data, assets, and documentation. You’ll research tools, compare options, and report back in plain language.
Part of doing this job well is understanding our business end to end, from product in to product out. Not all of this role happens at a keyboard. You cannot meaningfully improve a process you haven’t seen in person.
Mentorship and Structure
This is a structured one-year program. It is not a thrown-into-the-deep-end role, and it is not a fetch-coffee, run-errands, busywork apprenticeship either. From day one you will be doing real work, with real mentorship, on things the business actually depends on.
You’ll be assigned a primary mentor (our Chief of Staff) and a secondary mentor (our Founder). Expect:
- Weekly check-ins with your primary mentor.
- Monthly progress reviews.
- Quarterly competency assessments tied to the four-quarter arc.
- A capstone project and presentation at the end.
The first 90 days are a structured probationary period. We’ll meet at week 2, day 30, day 60, and day 90 to review fit, communication, coachability, and progress on foundational skills. This is honest and two-way. If it isn’t working for either of us, we’ll part on good terms. If it is, the rest of the year unlocks, and so does the path beyond it.
On Craft (What We Mean by “No Slop”)
AI makes it easy to produce a lot of output quickly. It also makes it easy to produce a lot of bad output quickly: generic copy, shallow summaries, plausible-sounding nonsense, work that looks right but doesn’t hold up. The industry has a name for this: slop.
We are not interested in slop. We’re looking for someone who wants to be mentored toward the opposite: developing the judgment and taste to tell the difference between output that’s actually good and output that just looks good. Getting real leverage out of AI is a skill. We’ll teach you how we think about it, and we expect you to care about the quality of what you ship.
What You’ll Gain
- Job security through skills. You’ll spend a year being paid to learn how to actually use AI in a working business, mentored by people who do it every day. The market is hungry for these skills, and most schools haven’t caught up. Whatever happens after this apprenticeship, you leave more valuable in the job market, not less.
- Job stability through us. AI is destabilizing the job market, particularly at the large companies that lay off in waves to hit quarterly numbers. We aren’t one of those companies. We’re a stable, growing, privately held business with no quarterly numbers to hit. Our chief of staff, who runs the company day to day, started here as an intern twelve years ago. Every senior person on our team has been with us for at least a decade. We’re loyal to people who are loyal to us, and we expect this apprenticeship to be the start of a long career here for the right person.
- Direct mentorship from our founder and his chief of staff on how to think, work, and use AI well.
- Real, portfolio-worthy work experience from day one.
- Broad exposure to how a modern e-commerce business actually operates, across every department.
- Time for a life outside of work. We don’t require overtime. You have a personal life, and we think you should have time for it. When you’re here, be here. When you’re not, be not.
How to Apply
Email founder@modernistpantry.com with your resume (or a simple summary of what you’ve done: school, jobs, projects, anything that tells us who you are) along with a short note answering:
Tell us about something you tried, built, or figured out on your own using AI. What you were trying to do, what happened, and what you learned from it.
Our promise: If you take the time to write that note, we’ll take the time to write you back. Every applicant who submits a thoughtful response will receive a personal reply from us, whether or not we move forward together.
One last thing. Please also include short answers to these two questions with your note:
- Are you legally authorized to work in the United States? (Yes / No)
- Will you now or in the future require sponsorship for employment visa status? (Yes / No)
Our Hiring Process
We believe you should know what you’re signing up for, so here’s the whole thing.
- A 30-minute phone conversation to get to know each other and cover the basics.
- A longer video call (about 90 minutes) where we walk through your life chronologically. Not a test, a conversation, and a chance for us to really understand your story.
- A short take-home task (about 2 hours). You’ll use AI tools to help answer a real, practical question. You pick the 2-hour window; we send the task when you’re ready to start. We’ll tell you exactly what we’re looking for and what we’re not.
- One onsite visit to Eliot (about 90 minutes). We’ll debrief the task together, work on a small real problem side by side, talk about how you learn, and show you around our facility. You’ll meet the team.
- Reference calls with three to five people you’ve worked with, studied under, or played for. You’ll help arrange them.
- A final conversation and an offer, or an honest no.
The whole process usually takes two to three weeks from first call to offer. Once you accept, the apprenticeship begins with the structured 90-day probationary period described above. We move as fast as you do.
About Modernist Pantry
Modernist Pantry is a specialty food and e-commerce company based in Eliot, Maine. We help chefs, makers, and curious home cooks turn ordinary meals into memorable and magical experiences, and we ship our products to customers around the world. We’re a small team doing real work on real products. No layers, no theater.