Intern M Software Engineering

Software Engineering Intern
As a company, we are passionate about our customers, fearless in the face of barriers, and driven by data. As an engineering team, we value bottom-up innovation and decentralized decision-making: We are looking for individuals who thrive in a fast-moving, innovative, and customer-focused setting.
About the Role As a software engineering intern, you will work closely with experienced engineers at Branch and make significant contributions to our products and code base for 4-6 months. You will brainstorm, design, code, debug, and ship features serving our millions of customers while picking up skills necessary for your career.
Build out functionality for existing and new product lines and platforms such as Credit, Payments, KYC, Data Platforms, etc.
Integrate with various third-party systems, including payment systems, identity providers, and messaging platforms.
Have some experience building Backend that are more than just toy projects. Applications that have real users or an open source project would be a great plus.
You have a solid foundation in computer science fundamentals, distributed systems, data storage.
Know your way through various flavors of Unix and commonly used command line utilities.
Proficiency with at least one mainstream language like Python, Ruby, Java, Kotlin, etc.
You've started and/or contributed to projects you're passionate about.
The following describes the traits we expect in our engineers, and reflects instincts developed over years of shipping real software. If you are early in your career, we do not expect you to demonstrate all of it yet — but we do expect a genuine appreciation for why these qualities matter, an honest sense of where you stand against them, and the drive to close the gap. You have a deep understanding of web fundamentals, data modeling, and distributed systems. You apply proven design patterns to build modular, scalable solutions and ensure that security, performance, and observability are baked into your work from the outset.
You use automated testing as both a blueprint for clean architecture and a safety net for refactoring. You believe that well-designed code should be inherently testable, and you hold all contributions, whether human or AI generated, to the same standard of quality and maintainability.
You understand the full software development lifecycle. You can break down ambiguous projects into granular, estimable tasks that can be delegated effectively, ensuring a predictable and transparent path to delivery. You push back when the spec is wrong, ask the question that reframes the problem, and share ownership of whether the thing was worth building in the first place.
AI proficiency

AI fluency is table stakes. You use AI to amplify your logic, not to replace it. You decompose ambiguous problems into clear steps and dependencies before prompting, ensuring you drive the architecture rather than allowing the AI to improvise a structure that compounds errors at high speed.
You hold AI-generated output to the same rigorous standards as human written code. You have the intuition to catch hallucinations of correctness, e.g. elegant looking code that fails subtly or tests that pass without actually asserting logic, and you take total accountability for the final implementation. you can clearly articulate your technical reasoning whenever you choose to override an AI's suggestion.
You proactively mitigate risks inherent to agentic workflows, including prompt injection, data leakage, and secret management. You treat AI-era security as a fundamental part of the engineering process, ensuring that "agentic" doesn't mean "unsecured."
You stay current with the evolving AI landscape and understand the underlying mechanics of the models and tools you use. You make high-velocity, high-quality decisions. You are highly entrepreneurial and manage your own time, energy, and quality without oversight. You possess the grit to keep moving when things go sideways and the judgment to know exactly when to pull in help to stay on track.
You catch the inconsistent behavior, the edge case bug, and the green test suite that doesn't actually verify anything, maintaining a high bar for the small things that define quality.
You write with the clarity of someone who expects to be read and ask the sharp, uncomfortable questions that often reveal hidden project risks.
You make those around you better through candid, helpful feedback, active listening, and a genuine commitment to helping your peers grow.
You own what you ship. Architecting and writing the code is half the job. Testing, monitoring, documenting, and being on the hook when it breaks is the other half.
You communicate in structured, async-friendly ways, keep your calendar and commitments reliable, and show up for shared responsibilities and rituals that keep the team functioning.
A job offer depending on your performance during the internship