MIT- Software Engineer Intern | Helios

Role overview

A 12-week software engineering internship on the team that builds and operates a fully managed cloud database service running across major public cloud providers. Interns join a small, collaborative engineering group contributing to production systems that span the control plane, data plane, reliability, observability, developer tooling, and customer-facing cloud experiences. The work involves designing, building, and shipping features that provision, scale, monitor, and protect customer database workspaces at scale.

Responsibilities

- Develop features and services that support the full lifecycle of customer workspaces and managed databases - Build automation for provisioning, scaling, upgrades, backups, and recovery workflows - Improve service reliability, availability, observability, and operational efficiency across the cloud stack - Design and implement backend services and APIs for cloud database management - Investigate and resolve performance, scalability, and correctness issues in distributed systems - Write production code, tests, and documentation, and participate in code reviews, debugging, and team planning

Requirements

- Currently enrolled in a bachelor's or master's degree program in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a closely related technical field - Strong foundation in data structures, algorithms, and software design - Programming experience in Go, Java, Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, or a comparable language - Conceptual understanding of operating systems, distributed systems, networking, or databases - Comfort working on Linux or Unix-based systems with solid analytical and problem-solving skills - Clear communication, collaboration skills, curiosity, ownership mindset, and willingness to learn (no prior professional experience required)

Nice to have

- Coursework or project experience in distributed systems, cloud computing, databases, networking, or operating systems - Hands-on work building backend services, APIs, automation, or developer tools - Familiarity with containers, Kubernetes, or major public cloud platforms - Exposure to observability, monitoring, debugging, or performance analysis - Contributions to production software, open-source projects, or other substantial technical work - Interest in reliability engineering and operating services at scale

Benefits and work setup

- 12-week internship embedded with a small, collaborative engineering team - Mentorship from experienced cloud and distributed-systems engineers - Hands-on experience building software for a production distributed database platform - Exposure to cloud infrastructure, database internals, reliability practices, and large-scale automation - Opportunities to take ownership of meaningful work that progresses toward production - Collaboration across engineering and product teams in a supportive, growth-focused environment