Systems 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 someone who keeps asking what happens underneath an API, a process, or a virtual machine, then reads and experiments until they can explain it. You'll work on runtime, storage, networking, or virtualization problems with engineers who care about correctness and performance.

About the internship

This is a paid, full-time, approximately three-month internship in San Francisco. Applications are open throughout the year, with start dates agreed individually. You'll work alongside Dedalus engineers on a scoped project the team can use, 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.

What you might own

• A reproducible investigation into a slow startup, restore, or I/O path. Establish a baseline, isolate the bottleneck, and measure a focused change.

• A runtime or storage improvement with tests for cancellation, resource cleanup, or recovery after a process stops.

• A failure-injection test that exposes an incorrect ordering or lifecycle assumption and verifies the repair.

• A scoped implementation from a systems paper or specification, with a comparison that explains where the idea helps and where it does not.

The project will have an agreed scope and completion criteria. Finishing includes code, tests, an explanation of the decisions, and a handoff another engineer can use.

What we look for

You can build and debug software in Rust, Go, C, C++, or a similar language. Rust is preferred but not required. You have a working understanding of memory, concurrency, data structures, and the operating-system behavior your project depends on.

Relevant work might be a small storage engine, networking tool, runtime, compiler, operating-system component, or performance investigation. Coursework, research, employment, open source, and independent projects all count. Explain what you personally implemented and what you learned beyond the initial 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.

This internship may be a poor fit if

• You want a tutorial with every implementation step supplied.

• You cannot explain or debug the code in the project you submit.

• You lose interest after the first successful run, before checking failure cases or documenting what remains incomplete.

Logistics

Paid, full-time, and in person in San Francisco for approximately three months. Applications are accepted year-round. Interns who demonstrate strong technical ability, judgment, ownership, and mutual fit may be considered for full-time roles. 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.

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.