Infrastructure Engineer Intern

Skills this role screens for

The work

ABOUT THE ROLE

Dedalus Labs builds persistent computers for AI agents. Our flagship product, Dedalus Machines, gives agents an isolated environment where they can run software, keep files and state, and work over time.

We're looking for someone who notices a slow build, a repeated manual step, or a service that fails in a way nobody can explain, and wants to make it better. You'll improve the team's development tools and workflows through focused fixes and speed improvements.

ABOUT THE INTERNSHIP

This is a paid, full-time internship or co-op in San Francisco lasting 3-9 months, depending on the program and agreed scope. Applications are open throughout the year, including off-cycle terms. Share your available start date and duration. You'll work alongside Dedalus engineers with direct feedback on your implementation and decisions.

We want evidence that you can learn something difficult, finish a working version, and improve it when the first approach fails. You do not need prior production ownership. You should already have a project you understand well enough to explain its hardest bug, its limits, and your personal contribution.

Your main work will be fixing bugs and papercuts, simplifying code, improving tests and tooling, and making focused speed improvements. You will work within existing systems with support from an engineer. This is how you learn the codebase and our standards. Responsibility grows as you demonstrate sound judgment, reliable execution, and clear communication.

Also

WORK YOU MIGHT TAKE ON

Your project will have an agreed scope and completion criteria. The outcome should be usable by the team, with tests, documentation, and a clear account of its limitations.

WHAT WE LOOK FOR

You have completed a meaningful programming project in Go, Rust, C, C++, or a similar language. You can explain its design, inspect its behavior on Linux, and investigate a failure. Experience with CI/CD, containers, Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, networking, or infrastructure as code is useful.

Show us a tool someone used, a service you operated, a difficult bug you reproduced, or an experiment that led to a working improvement. Research and coursework are welcome too. Tell us what you personally implemented, including any decisions or extensions beyond the starting instructions.

When you get stuck, you narrow the problem, read the relevant source or documentation, and try an experiment that can teach you something. You ask for help with the evidence you've collected and explain what you need to understand next. You act on feedback and keep ownership of the result.

You use AI coding tools where they help. You must be able to explain the resulting code, test its behavior, and correct it when it is wrong. We care about your judgment and understanding throughout the work.

We evaluate the work relative to your experience and opportunities. A degree, a particular employer, or owning hardware is not a prerequisite. Be specific about what you have already learned and where you want to go deeper.

• A build, test, or deployment improvement. Trace where the time goes, identify repeated work or a reliability problem, and verify the change against the same workload.
• A provisioning or developer-tooling workflow that another engineer can run and troubleshoot from its documentation.
• A small code change that eliminates repeated work, improves build or cache efficiency, or speeds up a developer workflow, with tests for the behavior it changes.
• Diagnostics that connect a failed operation to the relevant logs, metrics, and resource state, followed by a fix for the underlying problem.

Also

THIS INTERNSHIP MAY BE A POOR FIT IF

• You want to configure tools without understanding or investigating the software they run.
• You need every next step supplied before trying a small experiment or asking a focused question.
• You declare an improvement without checking whether another engineer can use it and whether the result is m