Systems Engineer Intern

Build things outside of class simply because you enjoy it.

What you’ll build

• Core compute and runtime primitives for long-running AI agents.

• Virtualization, sandboxing, and isolation systems for secure multi-tenant workloads.

• Persistent state, storage, snapshotting, and recovery mechanisms.

• Low-latency scheduling and resource-management systems.

• Networking and runtime infrastructure across the agent execution path.

• Profiling, debugging, benchmarking, and performance tooling.

• Production-grade systems software in Rust, Go, C, or C++.

Representative projects

You might find yourself working on problems like:

• Reducing sandbox startup latency from seconds to milliseconds.

• Building snapshot and recovery mechanisms for persistent agent state.

• Designing a scheduler for thousands of concurrent, long-running workloads.

• Profiling bottlenecks across storage, networking, scheduling, and runtime layers.

• Improving isolation and resource controls for secure multi-tenant execution.

• Building test harnesses that simulate machine loss, degraded networks, and partial failures.

• Implementing or evaluating ideas from systems research against our production architecture.

What we look for

• Strong programming fundamentals, including data structures, concurrency, memory, and performance.

• Experience building and debugging software in Rust, Go, C, C++, or another systems-oriented language. Rust is preferred but not required.

• Exposure to systems through coursework, research, open source, internships, or self-directed projects.

• Curiosity about how operating systems, networks, storage, and runtimes work beneath their abstractions.

• The ability to investigate difficult bugs, reason clearly about tradeoffs, and communicate what you learn.

• High agency, fast learning, thoughtful responses to feedback, and end-to-end ownership.

Especially strong signals

• A storage engine, scheduler, database, runtime, compiler, operating system, hypervisor, container system, or distributed service you built.

• Experience with virtualization, sandboxing, containers, or hypervisors.

• Familiarity with distributed storage, replication, consensus, or consistency models.

• Experience profiling or optimizing latency, throughput, memory usage, or resource consumption.

• Meaningful contributions to systems-focused open-source projects.

• Systems research accompanied by a working implementation.

• Technical writing that clearly explains architecture, failure modes, and engineering tradeoffs.

• A project where you encountered a difficult failure and can explain how you diagnosed it.

Taste

You know the difference between code that merely works and code that’s built to last.

You care about elegant engineering, good abstractions, and understanding why systems behave the way they do.

Tips

The first thing we look at is your GitHub.

Show us things you’ve built. Personal projects. Research. Hackathons. Operating systems projects. Infrastructure tooling. Homelabs. Open-source contributions.

We care far more about demonstrated curiosity and technical ability than your class year or prior internship experience.

A meeting lands on your calendar

If they’re a yes, I book the chat. You show up — that’s the whole job-hunt.