Systems Engineer Summer 2027 Intern

Dedalus Labs; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 25,000 - 35,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Housing support provided where applicable

Interns work on production systems alongside full-time engineers

High-performing interns may receive return offers for full-time positions

Job summary

Dedalus Labs is looking for interns in San Francisco to build distributed systems for AI agents. You'll develop infrastructure that powers advanced AI functionalities, optimizing performance and reliability.

Ideal candidates have solid computer science skills and experience with languages like Rust or Go. This 12-week summer internship offers the chance to work alongside full-time engineers, with housing support provided.

Qualifications

• Strong fundamentals in computer science are essential.
• Coursework or research experience in relevant areas is needed.
• Experience with Rust is preferred, along with other programming languages.

Responsibilities

• Build distributed infrastructure for AI agent workloads.
• Develop persistent compute and storage primitives.
• Optimize networking and storage performance.

Skills

Strong computer science fundamentals

Experience with Rust, Go, C/C++, or similar languages

Strong debugging and problem-solving skills

Excitement about learning difficult technical topics quickly

High agency, curiosity, and excellent engineering judgment

Education

Coursework or research in operating systems, distributed systems, networking, or systems programming

Tools

Kubernetes or modern cloud infrastructure

Virtualization, containers, or hypervisors

Job description

Mission

Dedalus Labs is an AI research neolab building infrastructure for AI agents. We’re building the persistent compute layer that powers the next generation of autonomous software. Our platform spans virtualization, distributed systems, storage, networking, orchestration, and runtime infrastructure for long-running AI agents. We’re looking for students who enjoy understanding computers all the way down.

You might be a fit if you

• Think abstractions are useful because you understand what’s underneath them.
• Enjoy figuring out how operating systems, networks, and distributed systems actually work.
• Care about latency, throughput, memory usage, and system reliability.
• Like debugging difficult problems and learning from them.
• Think distributed systems are fun rather than frightening.
• Read systems blogs or papers because you’re genuinely interested.
• Build things outside of class simply because you enjoy it.
• Believe the best infrastructure disappears into the background.
• Are high agency and fiercely independent.
• Say how things ought to be built, then build them.
• Are a competitive teammate with a heart of gold.
• Are hungry to learn, improve, and reflect deeply on feedback.
• Go above and beyond in everything you do.

What you’ll build

• Distributed infrastructure for AI agent workloads.
• Persistent compute and storage primitives.
• Virtualization and sandboxing systems.
• Scheduling, orchestration, and reliability infrastructure.
• Internal developer tooling and platforms.
• Production infrastructure that powers real developers and AI agents.

Representative Projects

• Improving sandbox startup latency from seconds to milliseconds.
• Building components of a distributed storage layer for persistent agent state.
• Optimizing networking, storage, or runtime performance.
• Building internal tooling that makes deploying and operating agents dramatically simpler.
• Designing and implementing infrastructure that supports thousands of concurrent agent workloads.
• Investigating production issues and improving system reliability.

What we look for

• Strong computer science fundamentals.
• Experience with Rust (preferred), Go, C/C++, or similar languages.
• Coursework, research, or personal projects involving operating systems, distributed systems, networking, or systems programming.
• Strong debugging and problem-solving skills.
• Excitement about learning difficult technical topics quickly.
• High agency, curiosity, and excellent engineering judgment.

Nice-to-have

• Coursework or research in operating systems, distributed systems, databases, or networking.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes or modern cloud infrastructure.
• Experience with virtualization, containers, or hypervisors.
• Understanding of distributed storage or consistency models.
• Open-source contributions.
• Hackathons, research, or ambitious personal infrastructure projects.
• Technical writing or systems blogs.

Taste

You know the difference between code that merely works and code that’s built to last. You care about elegant engineering, good abstractions, and understanding why systems behave the way they do.

Logistics

• 12-week summer internship.
• In person in San Francisco.
• Housing support provided where applicable.
• Interns work on production systems alongside full-time engineers.
• High-performing interns may receive return offers for full-time positions.