Forward Deployed Engineering Intern

Location: Remote (United States)
Work Model: Remote
Industry: AI recruiting and talent marketplace (B2B SaaS)
Compensation: $20–$35 per hour
About The Company
TalentPluto is a Y Combinator-backed startup building the hiring stack for high-growth companies. We run two connected products: a talent network that places engineering, go-to-market, and operations people into fast-moving startups, and an AI recruiting tool that lets a hiring team run candidate search, tiered enrichment, rubric-based scoring, and outbound campaigns directly from their assistant. We work with dozens of venture-backed startups across AI, developer tools, fintech, and healthcare. The team is small and founder-led, and interns work on live problems rather than practice ones.
The Opportunity
This is a forward deployed engineering internship: engineering pointed directly at real workflow problems rather than at a backlog. You will sit close to the people who actually use our product, including customers and our own internal operators, find where the work breaks down, and build the scripts, integrations, and internal tools that fix it. A good week here might mean debugging why an enrichment pipeline is returning the wrong person, wiring an integration between two systems that were never meant to talk, and then explaining to a non-technical operator what changed and why.
The role suits someone who likes the practical half of engineering: shipping something small that removes a real bottleneck today, rather than a perfect abstraction that lands next quarter. You will need to be comfortable with ambiguity, because the problem is often not defined before you go looking at it.
Responsibilities
Build and maintain internal tools, scripts, and automations that solve real operational bottlenecks.
Work with APIs, data pipelines, and integrations between systems, including debugging them when they misbehave.
Sit with users, customers, and internal operators to find where workflows actually break, then fix the underlying cause.
Investigate data quality problems and trace them back to their source.
Explain technical decisions and tradeoffs clearly to non-technical teammates.
Requirements
Strong coding fundamentals in JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, or a similar language.
Comfort working with APIs, data, scripts, and technical debugging.
Strong communication skills, including the ability to explain technical concepts clearly to non-engineers.
Genuine interest in customer-facing or operations-facing engineering work.
Resourceful and practical, comfortable solving ambiguous problems without a fully specified brief.
Self-directed and comfortable working in a remote startup environment.

Work arrangement
Yes