Member of Technical Staff, Infrastructure Intern

Sycamore; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 42,000 - 66,000; Full time

Job summary

Sycamore is building the trusted agent operating system for the enterprise. We are a small, engineering-led team working directly with Fortune 500 enterprises.

This summer internship lets you own a piece of work that ships, with a partner accountable for success, but the same standards apply. You will work on infrastructure that includes Kubernetes-based serving, and you will ship production code and be judged on correctness, testing, and reliability.

Qualifications

• Currently pursuing an undergraduate or graduate degree in computer science, engineering, or a related field, or recently graduated. We care about what you have built, not your year or program.
• Evidence that you have built and shipped something real: a project with users, a substantial open-source contribution, a previous internship where you owned production code, or something you built because you wanted it to exist.
• Solid software fundamentals. You can design a data model, write an API, reason about failure, and debug code you did not write.
• The instinct to test your own work and to try the realistic path rather than the happy path.
• AI-native. You use coding agents and modern models as a force multiplier while still understanding the code you ship and being able to explain your decisions.
• Clear communication, including the ability to say when you are stuck.
• Comfort with ambiguity. The problem you are given will not arrive fully specified.

Responsibilities

• Own a real project end to end, from scoping through implementation, testing, review, and deployment.
• Write production code that meets the same bar as everyone else’s, and go through the same review.
• Test your own work, including the paths that are inconvenient to test.
• Ask for help early when you are stuck, and be specific about what you have already tried.
• Document what you built well enough that the person who inherits it does not have to reconstruct your reasoning.

Skills

Solid software fundamentals

AI-native mindset

Clear communication

Ability to learn quickly

Ambiguity tolerance

Education

Undergraduate or graduate CS/engineering

Job description

Spend a summer building production software on the platform enterprises use to run agentic apps.

About Sycamore

Sycamore is building the trusted agent operating system for the enterprise. Our platform helps companies build, deploy, and orchestrate agentic apps that take on real operational work, with the security and control large organizations need.

We are a small, engineering-led team working directly with Fortune 500 enterprises. We have raised $65M from Coatue and Lightspeed, along with other investors and industry leaders.

The role

This is a real engineering internship. You will own a piece of work that ships, that other people depend on, and that is still running after you leave. The scope will be narrower than a full-time engineer’s and you will have a direct partner accountable for your project succeeding, but the expectations for the work are the same as for anyone else here: it has to be correct, it has to be tested, and it has to hold up when someone depends on it.

We will pick your project deliberately, with you. It needs to be small enough to finish in the time available and consequential enough that finishing it matters.

Infrastructure at Sycamore

Infrastructure builds and operates the substrate everything else runs on: Kubernetes-based serving, the sandboxes agents execute in, deployment and rollback, networking and identity, tenant-isolated data systems, and the observability that makes all of it debuggable.

It is a good team to intern on if you like systems that are real. The failures are concrete, the feedback comes from production, and the tooling you build gets used by every engineer here.

What you will do

• Own a real project end to end, from scoping through implementation, testing, review, and deployment.
• Write production code that meets the same bar as everyone else’s, and go through the same review.
• Test your own work, including the paths that are inconvenient to test.
• Ask for help early when you are stuck, and be specific about what you have already tried.
• Document what you built well enough that the person who inherits it does not have to reconstruct your reasoning.

The environment you will work in

Our current infrastructure environment includes GCP, Kubernetes and GKE, Knative, Envoy, Cloudflare, Pulumi, Helm, BuildKit, PostgreSQL and Cloud SQL, object storage, container registries, workload identity, Python and Go control-plane services, Kubernetes operators, GitHub Actions, and production observability.

We also support customer-controlled deployment requirements and maintain more than one application-serving path during platform migrations.

This is context, not a checklist. We do not require previous experience with every cloud product or tool. We care about deep systems fundamentals, the ability to learn unfamiliar infrastructure, and evidence that you have personally operated and recovered important multi-tenant systems.

What we are looking for

• Currently pursuing an undergraduate or graduate degree in computer science, engineering, or a related field, or recently graduated. We care about what you have built, not your year or program.
• Evidence that you have built and shipped something real: a project with users, a substantial open-source contribution, a previous internship where you owned production code, or something you built because you wanted it to exist.
• Solid software fundamentals. You can design a data model, write an API, reason about failure, and debug code you did not write.
• The instinct to test your own work and to try the realistic path rather than the happy path.
• AI-native. You use coding agents and modern models as a force multiplier while still understanding the code you ship and being able to explain your decisions.
• Clear communication, including the ability to say when you are stuck.
• Comfort with ambiguity. The problem you are given will not arrive fully specified.

You do not need prior experience with agentic apps, enterprise software, or our stack. You do need to learn quickly and to care about whether what you built actually works.

Interview process

• A 30-minute introductory conversation.
• Two 60-minute technical interviews, one focused on coding and one on how you approach an open-ended problem.
• A short take-home where you build something real and walk us through your decisions.

Why join

• Ship production software that enterprise teams actually use, during an internship.
• Work alongside engineers building something genuinely hard, with the same standards applied to your work.
• Learn what production AI systems require, which is very different from what a demo requires.
• Get real ownership and real feedback in a short window.
• Receive competitive compensation, and a genuine conversation about a full-time role if it goes well.
• Work with people who will tell you honestly when something is not good enough yet.