Systems Engineer Summer 2027 Intern

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

You might find yourself working on problems like:

• 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.

Compensation : $5K - $10K / monthly

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.

Tips

The first thing we look at is your GitHub.

Show us things you’ve built. Personal projects. Research. Hackathons. Operating systems projects. Infrastructure tooling. Homelabs. Open-source contributions.

We care far more about demonstrated curiosity and technical ability than your class year or prior internship experience.

About Dedalus Labs

Dedalus Labs is building the MCP gateway for the next generation of AI applications by unifying the fragmented AI agents ecosystem with a single drop-in API endpoint. We host and manage your MCP servers, allowing users to go from idea to production in a single click. Users can pick any model from any vendor, mix-and-match whatever tools they want from our MCP marketplace, and ship within minutes.