Design Engineer Intern

Job Description

Job Description

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 a design engineer intern who can turn an idea into an interface people can use. You notice the awkward spacing, the confusing state change, and the extra step a user keeps getting stuck on. You want to understand the problem, implement the details, and see whether your changes help.

About the internship

We accept applications throughout the year and typically run four internship seasons annually. Each paid internship lasts approximately three months and is full-time for the duration. Start dates are coordinated with the candidate and team.

You'll work across interaction design, visual design, and frontend engineering on a meaningful project with direct feedback from Dedalus engineers. We want a builder who has already finished a working interface and can explain the decisions and implementation. Prior production experience is welcome but not required.

What you might own

• A complete product flow, from a rough sketch to React and TypeScript components connected to real data.

• Clear loading, progress, error, and recovery states for an asynchronous operation.

• An investigation into slow rendering or data fetching, with a measured fix.

• An interaction refinement informed by watching someone use the product, including keyboard, small-screen, and accessibility checks.

You'll agree on a useful scope, implement it, test it, and refine it from feedback. Completion includes the inconvenient states discovered after the first demo.

What we look for

You can build with React and TypeScript and make deliberate choices about layout, state, components, and CSS. You can show a working interface or a walkthrough of private work and explain what you personally designed and implemented.

You care about responsive design, accessibility, perceived performance, and motion that helps someone understand a transition. Next.js, Vite, Remix, Tailwind CSS, or similar tools are relevant. Canvas, WebGL, shaders, and advanced animation can be useful additional depth when the work calls for them.

You can explain a design you revised after feedback, a technical problem you investigated, and a detail you chose to leave out to finish a better overall result. Work from coursework, employment, research, open source, or independent projects is welcome. Use the GitHub and portfolio fields to point us to your strongest work, including a walkthrough when the implementation is private.

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.

This internship may be a poor fit if

• You want to hand off mockups without building the interface.

• You judge the result only from a screenshot and lose interest in real data, keyboard use, slow networks, or failed requests.

• You cannot explain the implementation or how you evaluated whether it served the user's task.

Logistics

• Full-time for approximately three months.

• In person, five days per week, in San Francisco. This is not a remote internship.

• Relocation support may be available.

• Visa support may be available based on individual eligibility and timing.

• Exceptional performance may lead to consideration for a full-time position. Conversion is not guaranteed.

Show us your work

Use your application to show us one thing you built and one difficult problem you investigated. They can come from the same project. Choose work you already have. We are not asking you to build a new project for this application.

• Work: Show the code, demo, design, or result. Explain what you personally owned, what you reused, and one decision that made the result better or simpler.

• Investigation: Describe the symptom, your first explanation, the evidence that changed your thinking, and how you established the result. Include the workload or users involved and any important limitations.

• Writing: Share one piece of your best writing as a separate, required sample. Simple and succinct is welcome. Choose work that shows your thinking and your voice in a professional or similarly thoughtful context: a strong README, design note, blog post, postmortem, proposal, or essay. A serious, self-contained Reddit post is fine. Tweets, Twitter/X threads, and short social posts do not count. Link it or paste a redacted excerpt. Tell us the intended audience, what you wrote, why you chose it, and any coauthors or AI assistance.

Work from employment, open source, research, coursework, or independent projects is welcome. Public source code is optional. A redacted excerpt or a concrete account of private work is fine. Keep confidential information out of your application.

Tell us which problem in this role you want to own and why. If your strongest evidence is easy to miss on a resume, point us to it. An existing demo or short screen recording is welcome, and video is optional.

A portfolio case study can provide the work, analysis, and writing together. Include an interface we can inspect, what you changed after feedback, and what you would like to accomplish during a three-month season at Dedalus.

Compensation

Internship pay is $45-$50 per hour. The monthly range shown above is an approximate equivalent of $7,800-$8,667 at 40 hours per week, averaged over 52 weeks per year. Actual pay is based on hours worked.