IAP Software Engineering Intern 2027

Cartesiansystems; Cambridge (MA); On-site; USD 28,000 - 34,000; Full time

Job summary

Cartesian is seeking a motivated software engineer intern to help scale our platform and onboard new customers. You will work with senior engineers to ship code to real customers, owning a defined project during IAP.

This on-site role is based in Kendall Square, Boston/Cambridge, MA, with full-time attention required for the internship. You will gain rapid exposure to a startup environment, learning fast, and contributing to data interfaces, platform modernization, ML tooling, and security

Qualifications

• Internship-focused software development experience or coursework.
• Ability to work independently with minimal supervision on a defined project.
• Strong problem-solving and debugging skills.
• Excellent communication and teamwork within a startup environment.

Responsibilities

• Define and own a project during the internship duration.
• Develop interfaces for data and users with international retail brands.
• Modernize stack toward Infrastructure-as-Code and improve Postgres performance.
• Collaborate with research teams to enable ML workflows and edge-device data collection.
• Contribute to security tooling and credential management.
• Help improve UI/UX and optimize cloud infrastructure costs.
• Build end-to-end test infrastructure across devices, mobile, and backend.

Skills

Strong coding

Ownership

Fast learner

Tools

Python

FastAPI

Kotlin

Postgres

Terraform

Job description

Micro-Intern: Software Engineer (IAP - Alumni Host)

Location: On-site; Boston/Cambridge, MA; Dates: Full-Time; January 4, 2027 - January 29, 2027; Compensation: $20-25/hr

About the Company

Cartesian is building spatial intelligence for indoor environments to drive operational efficiency. We’re tackling one of the biggest challenges in the $35T global retail industry: in-store inventory visibility. Our platform delivers accurate indoor positioning and actionable product location insights, helping retailers streamline operations, optimize workflows, and reduce inefficiencies. Leveraging wireless signals, we provide a uniquely scalable, infrastructure-free solution already deployed by international fashion brands. Founded by an MIT engineering professor and alum behind the award-winning, patented core technologies, Cartesian spun out in 2023. Originally backed by the prestigious SBIR Award from the US National Science Foundation, we've bootstrapped to a live product that's now deployed in over a dozen countries and have been aggressively scaling in the market.

About the Role

We are scaling up our platform and developing new features to meet product demand. We are looking for a motivated software engineering intern to help us integrate with new customers, improve our core platform, and expand our product capabilities. We are seeking individuals who want to see how to design and develop new technology in a startup environment. You will work alongside senior engineers and ship code to real customers. This role is on-site, and our office is right in Kendall Square by the Red Line stop. The internship will be full-time. IAP is less than a month, and in order to maximize the value of the internship for you and Cartesian, it requires a full-time focus. If you have other commitments over IAP (e.g. clubs or classes), it probably won’t be a good fit.

What You’ll Do

At the beginning of IAP, we will define a specific project you will have ownership and responsibility for during internship duration. You will be learning extremely fast, providing clarity to ambiguity, and iterating on feedback each week.

• Customer Expansion: Developing robust interfaces for data and users with international retail brands.
• Platform: Modernizing our stack to Infrastructure-as-Code and upgrading our core Postgres platform for performance and resilience.
• Research Tooling: Work closely with research teams to build infrastructure for machine-learning development and collecting fast, accurate edge-device sensor data.
• Security and Tooling: Implementing a new system for enforcing short-lived machine-to-machine credentials, hardening our identity-and-access approach, and automating key rotation.
• UI/UX: Making user interactions between our product and the physical world more seamless, ergonomic, and beautiful.
• Optimization: Instrument and measure our cloud platform costs to optimize infrastructure, application, and development efficiency.
• Testing: Build full-stack test infrastructure across physical devices, mobile, and backend to maintain our bar for high quality and accelerate development.

These are just examples, and we will work closely with you to design a project that is important for the company and matches your interests. Please come prepared to your interview with an idea of the type of work you are looking to do over IAP.

About You

• High Growth : You're curious and learn fast. You'd rather dig into something unfamiliar than stay in your comfort zone.
• High Ownership: Given a task, you break it down with minimal oversight and make sure it gets done – even when it's ambiguous, or the last bit gets messy.
• Low Ego : You don’t know everything. You want the best ideas to win. Nothing is below you.
• Strong Coder: You write clean, working code without heavy hand-holding, and you can explain the "why" behind your choices, not just show the result. You’ve worked in large codebases on a team before.

Why Now?

We’re a fast-moving MIT startup at an important inflection point for our product growth and direction. We are building a talent-dense team of engineers and applied researchers to solve hard, high-impact problems in retail operations. The IAP internship is a great way to see the inner workings of a company going from an initial product to a broadly scaled platform across many customers. You will be able to shape real product and platform decisions.

Technology Stack

• Backend: FastAPI, Python, Hatchet
• Mobile: Android, Kotlin
• Hardware: RFID & Barcode Readers (e.g. Zebra)
• Data: Postgres, Blob Storage, Parquet
• Infrastructure: Azure, Kubernetes, Helm, Terraform
• Machine Learning: PyTorch, Ray
• Frontend: Next.js, Typescript, Tailwind

Interview Process

• Application (30 minutes) : Answer the logistical and interest questions.
• Interview (60 minutes) : Show us something cool you’ve built. Explain your decisions and what you learned. Ask any questions about the role or company.
• Offer Note: We’ve received a large number of applications for this internship in the past. We try our best to review everyone, but sometimes you may not hear back.