Software Engineering Intern, Backend & API

About the role

Join the engineering team and be assigned a dedicated mentor with weekly 1:1s, live code review sessions, and structured ramp milestones to achieve.

The PR bar is the same bar applied to full-time engineers. Mentorship is how we support you in meeting it — not a reason to lower expectations.

Ideal candidates operate 3 days on-site in Glendale, with flexibility around their academic schedule. Exposure across the full stack: .NET API, React/Capacitor frontend, Python data pipelines, and cloud infrastructure is provided.

Ai-assisted development is the default here. Engineers use Cursor, Copilot, and Claude as primary tools — you're expected to come in already working that way.

Role Overview

This isn't a "build a sample CRUD app and present at the end" internship — you'll be assigned real features and real technical debt from week one.

Six to twelve months is enough time to own something meaningful. You'll design API contracts, write business logic, push to staging, and ship to production — with engineers who will review your code seriously and expect you to review theirs. The mentorship is structured; the work is real.

What you'll do

• API Design & Feature Delivery
• Design and implement .NET Web API endpoints: contract design, business logic, data layer, and production deployment.
• Implement service-layer logic for core home services workflows — domain-heavy problems where understanding business rules is as important as writing clean code.
• Participate in API design discussions: versioning, validation, and error handling standards.
• Build and test integrations between backend services and third-party APIs.
• Contribute to technical design discussions — your perspective as someone newer to the codebase is genuinely useful.

• Performance, Quality Engineering Standards
• Investigate and improve slow queries and high-traffic endpoints: read execution plans, write indexes, and measure before and after.
• Write unit and integration tests for everything you ship; nothing merges without adequate coverage.
• Use AI tools (Cursor, Copilot, Claude) as part of your standard workflow — code generation, refactoring, test writing, navigating unfamiliar parts of the codebase. AI-assisted development is your default mode, not an occasional tool.
• Give and receive code review feedback from day one.

Qualifications

• Required
• C# coursework or project experience, or a strong background in another statically typed language (Java, Kotlin, Go, Swift) — we'll teach you .NET specifics, but you need to understand types, objects, and how compiled languages think.
• REST API design fundamentals: HTTP verbs, status codes, request/response shapes, and what makes an API painful vs. clean to consume.
• SQL — joins, filters, aggregations, and some intuition for why a query might be slow.
• Active, opinionated AI tool usage: "I use Copilot but I still read what it generates" is the right answer; "I paste whatever it outputs" is not. This is evaluated explicitly.
• Comfortable asking questions when stuck — after you've done your own research first.

• Nice to Have
• ASP.NET Core, Entity Framework, or broader .NET ecosystem experience.
• Dependency injection, repository patterns, or similar architectural concepts.
• Azure or another cloud platform.
• ORM or database migration tooling experience.

What You’ll Get

• Competitive hourly compensation, tiered by experience (undergraduate and graduate rates; details shared during the process).
• A dedicated mentor — weekly 1:1s, structured code review sessions, and long enough runway to own a feature from design to production.
• Work that ships — features you build will go to production users during the internship.
• Real code review under the same standards applied to the full-time team — not the kind that approves everything.
• AI tooling stipend (Cursor Pro, Claude Pro, or equivalent) — the AI-native expectation is real; we remove the financial barrier to getting there.
• Priority consideration for full-time roles upon graduation.

Location & Hybrid Policy

This role is based in Glendale, CA. We expect 3 days on-site per week, with flexibility around academic schedules communicated in advance. Fully remote arrangements are not offered.

Candidates who cannot commit to regular on-site presence in Glendale are not a fit for this program.

How to Apply

Send your resume. If you have code to share — GitHub, a school project, anything — include a link and note the part you're most proud of (or most embarrassed by; honest reflection is more useful than a curated portfolio).

Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis.