Software Engineering Intern (Full-Stack) — The Software That Runs a Protein Brewery

Farmless; Amsterdam; On-site; EUR 8,928 - 13,392; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Daily plant-based lunch

In-house gym

Team sports activities

Team events

Job summary

Farmless in Amsterdam is seeking a software engineering intern to help build BrewBase, our in‑house operating system for fermentation facilities. You’ll work end‑to‑end on a central project, collaborating with scientists to translate real workflows into durable data models and robust UI.

The role blends frontend and backend work in TypeScript, React, and PostgreSQL, with a strong emphasis on practical impact.

Qualifications

• Interest in fermentation biology and food science.
• Strong data modeling skills.
• Experience designing data models for scalable systems.
• Ability to communicate with scientists to translate requirements.

Responsibilities

• Build the analytics module end-to-end, from schema design to UI.
• Make live plant data readable with dashboards and trend views.
• Close the mass balance by modeling harvest as a conservation problem and building useful interfaces.
• Collaborate with scientists to refine requirements and ship improvements.

Skills

Full-stack

TypeScript

React

PostgreSQL

Data modeling

SQL

Python for analysis

Builder mindset

Fast learner

Job description

We’re building the protein breweries of the future. Our process is up to 5,000× more land-efficient than animal or plant protein. In the coming years, we’ll run our first commercial facilities producing thousands of tonnes of protein.

This internship is about the software those facilities run on. Not a website about the factory — the system the factory is operated from.

What BrewBase is

BrewBase is our in-house operating system. Every fermentation we run, every harvest, every food product we develop is planned, recorded, and analysed in it. When a fermentation scientist wants to know what happened in tank 3 at 4am, BrewBase is what they open.

It exists because nothing off the shelf does this. SCADA systems watch equipment. LIMS tools track samples. Neither understands a fermentation — that a run has phases, that a protocol has defaults a tank can override, that the broth in that tank becomes a powder that becomes a product, and that you need to follow that thread all the way through. Most companies in our position give up and use spreadsheets.

The role

Finding out what needs to be built is the start of the job: sitting with the scientists who run our fermentations, harvests and assays, and working out what they’re actually doing. That’s harder than it sounds. People will describe the process they think they follow, and the spreadsheet they actually use has ten exceptions in it that nobody mentions until you’ve shipped without them.

You work out the real answer, then you build it. Then you find out which parts you still got wrong, because the people using it are in the same building and they will tell you.

That’s the loop, and it’s why this internship is worth doing. Most interns ship into a void. You’ll ship at 11 and watch someone use it at 14.

The last person to do this internship built our Food Application module. They arrived, sat down with the food scientists, and built the whole thing: recipe formulation where a finished recipe can be promoted into an ingredient for the next one, with nutrient values rolling up automatically; blinded sensory panels that external tasters join by link; EU and US regulatory nutrition labels generated straight from the formulation. It’s one of BrewBase’s three top-level modules, the food team uses it every day, and they stopped opening Excel. That’s the scale of what an internship here can be.

What you’ll own

One central project, yours end to end. See three ideas below: which one you take depends on where you’re strongest and what the plant needs when you arrive, and we’ll work that out with you.

Build the analytics module.We run a growing array of specialised in‑house testing – HPLC, PCR, compositional assays – across both R&D and QA, and right now it lives in spreadsheets and instrument exports. You’d own the whole arc: designing the lab notebook our scientists actually work in, modelling what a test method and a specification and a result really are, building the QA workflows on top, and then going after the data at its source – pulling results off the instruments automatically instead of making someone retype them. This stretches from schema design to UI to talking to an HPLC.

Make a running plant legible.BrewBase is fed by live hardware – sensors, pumps, scales, streaming continuously from vessels in the building. Turning that firehose into something a human can read at a glance: control-room views, process flow mimics, trend and anomaly detection, alerting that fires when something is actually wrong and stays quiet when it isn’t. The hard parts are information density and real-time data at volume.

Close the mass balance.Every gram that goes into a harvest should come out of it, and when the numbers don’t add up, someone needs to know where. You’d work on the engine that models a harvest as a conservation problem and solves it, and on the flow-graph interface that points a scientist at the one measurement that’s missing or wrong.

Alongside whichever you take, you’ll get your hands on everything else – BrewBase is one system, and its parts touch.

The bar is the same whichever you take: it’s done when someone would notice if it went down. Not a demo, not a merged PR – the thing a scientist opens at 7am to find out what happened overnight.

Who you are

Full‑stack.TypeScript, React, Postgres, comfortable across frontend and backend. You don’t need to have used our exact stack.

You think in data models.This is the one we weight hardest. The difficulty in BrewBase is almost never the React – it’s deciding what a thing is, and what has to still be true about it in two years. You should have designed a schema that someone else then had to live with, and have opinions about how that went.

SQL, properly.Not an ORM’s worth. You should be comfortable in Postgres and know why a constraint beats a comment.

Builder mentality.You’ve built things outside coursework. Side projects, open source, something that runs and has users. Show us, don’t describe.

You have taste.We care about interfaces that are dense, fast, and precise. If you have a point of view about UI, you’ll enjoy it here. If you think a modal solves problems, less so.

Fast learner.Excited to dive into fermentation biology, analytical chemistry, and food science – domains few software engineers ever touch.

Mission driven.Rewriting how the world makes protein genuinely excites you.

Bonus points for: data visualisation done well, time-series data at scale, Python for analysis and automation, lab instrumentation or scientific software, a biology, chemistry or food science background, previous startup experience.

How we work

Small, highly technical, deeply ambitious. Every person here matters.

Our pilot plant is in our Amsterdam headquarters, and your users are twenty metres from your desk. You can watch someone use what you built, badly, and fix it before lunch. We build from first principles. If “industry standard” slows us down, we rewrite it. If you’re looking for a standard 9‑to‑5 internship, this is not it – your learning curve is as steep as you can handle.

Expected outcomes

• A module of BrewBase that is yours, in production, used daily by our scientists
• Deep full-stack judgement — schema design, API design, and interfaces under real constraints
• The rare experience of designing software for a domain nobody has solved yet
• Infrastructure that doesn’t exist anywhere else

Rewards

• A flat, fast, and curious team working on one of the most exciting challenges in food
• An international, high‑talent, low‑ego culture where ideas matter more than titles
• Room to grow into whatever version of the role you make yours
• Daily plant‑based lunch, snacks, fruits, drinks
• In‑house gym & regular team sport activities
• Fun off sites & team drinks

What we’re building

We’re going beyond the limiting constraints of photosynthesis. We use natural fermentation to turn simple ingredients into complex proteins. It’s what we've been doing for millennia with wine, beer, bread and yoghurt.

Yet most fermentations rely on sugars – which are derived from crops grown on agricultural land. Our fermentation platform relies on an easily storable and shippable renewable energy based feedstock. This allows us to break free from the limiting constraints of photosynthesis.

We’re building the spiritual successor to the Haber‑Bosch process. While Haber‑Bosch led to cheap synthetic fertilizer which currently feeds half of humanity, we have found a way to produce amino‑acid complete proteins up to ±5000X more land efficient than animals. By rough approximation this could multiply the carrying capacity of the earth by an order of magnitude. The result of our ambition should be visible from space.

About us

We’re a small, highly technical and deeply curious team with deep food and fermentation expertise with backgrounds from the Vegetarian Butcher, Perfect Day to Nature’s Fynd and many more.

We’re flat and interdisciplinary by design. We value autonomy, speed, and ambition. You’ll have the freedom to build, and the responsibility to do it well.

We’re based within the city ring of Amsterdam – for a reason. We want to attract the best people from around the world and believe that Amsterdam is a great place to settle – and bike to work. On top of that, the Netherlands is one of the most productive agricultural regions in the world. The Dutch have a mindset to push the boundaries of food production and have the practical expertise to scale up our fermentation platform.

We believe hardware startups can thrive in Europe. If we can get approval here, we can do it anywhere (and we want Europe to accelerate).

We’ve raised +€10M from world‑class investors including World Fund, Vorwerk Ventures, Revent, and Nucleus Capital, and European and national grants.