Protective Design Engineer Internship - Summer 2027

About the role

At KPFF Consulting Engineers, we are more than just an engineering design firm. For 65 years, we have dedicated ourselves to innovative, sustainable engineering that shapes the built environment and tackles complex infrastructure challenges. Our team culture emphasizes balance, growth, and well-being, supporting each member’s professional journey with flexibility, generous benefits, and a collaborative approach to work-life integration. With over 1,500 professionals across 36 offices nationwide, KPFF’s decentralized structure allows each office the flexibility to pursue projects aligned with their regional strengths. Learn more at www.kpff.com. Our Protective Design team focuses on an area of structural engineering that most students do not encounter in a typical internship: designing buildings and critical infrastructure to better withstand extreme events and security-related threats.

As a Protective Design Engineering Intern, you will work alongside engineers in San Francisco on projects focused on the safety, resilience, and security of the built environment. You may contribute to projects involving blast analysis, progressive collapse evaluation, anti-ram design, structural hardening, and other specialized protective design strategies for federal, commercial, and infrastructure clients. This is an opportunity to apply what you are learning in school to engineering challenges that go beyond conventional building design. You will see how structural behavior, dynamic loading, materials, analysis, and constructability come together when the performance requirements are especially demanding.

Responsibilities

• Hands-on engineering: Support structural modeling, analysis, calculations, and design for active protective design projects.
• Specialized experience: Learn how engineers evaluate structures for blast loads, progressive collapse, and other extreme conditions.
• Mentorship: Work alongside engineers who specialize in both structural and protective design.
• Project exposure: Gain insight into project coordination, construction administration, and site visits when opportunities allow.
• Collaboration: Work with multidisciplinary teams, clients, and project partners to solve complex engineering challenges.
• Career development: Build technical skills and explore a specialized career path within structural engineering.
• You will be part of the project team, not simply observing from the sidelines.
• Our goal is to give interns meaningful engineering experience, strong mentorship, and a better understanding of where a career in structural and protective design could take them.

Qualifications

• A strong passion for pursuing a career in structural or protective design engineering, ideally with interest in resilience, safety, and security of structures.
• Currently enrolled in a Bachelor’s program in Civil