Operational Automation Software Engineer (Intern)

Job Description

Operational Automation Engineer (Intern), Residential Energy | Tesla

The Tone:
This is an internship at Tesla, located on-site in any US location where Tesla has an Operations center, with Northern California preferred. Tesla builds residential energy solutions, driving the world’s transition to sustainable energy. This role is crucial for automating high-volume, multi-step operations within Tesla Energy by building and maintaining robust backend services, directly impacting the efficiency and scale of operations.

The TL;DR
• Role: Operational Automation Engineer (Intern), Residential Energy
• Type: Internship
• Location: In-person, US location with Tesla Operations Center (Northern California preferred)

• Mission: Automate high-volume, multi-step operations for Tesla Energy using backend services.
• Tech Stack: Python, FastAPI, REST APIs, Jenkins, Jira, LLMs, AI agents

What You’ll Actually Do
• Build: Develop and extend Python backend services using FastAPI to orchestrate complex multi-step workflows from beginning to end.
• Integrate: Implement REST API integrations, ensuring robust authentication, thorough schema validation, and resilient I/O with features like timeouts, retries, and structured error handling.
• Own: Manage CI/CD workflows, including maintaining Jenkins pipelines, conducting code reviews for pull requests with branch protection and Jira validation, troubleshooting failing checks, and coordinating deployments to production.
• Create: Develop web automation tools specifically for scenarios where direct APIs are not available for necessary integrations.
• Orchestrate: Deploy LLMs and AI agents for automation purposes, focusing on practical applications of tool-calling/agents to execute deterministic tasks with clear guardrails, effective prompt design, error handling, logging, and fallback paths.

The Must-Haves
• Background: Student currently pursuing a degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or holding equivalent experience.
• Experience: Ability to commit to a minimum of 12 weeks of full-time work (40 hours per week) for this internship, beginning August 2026 and continuing through the Fall term.
• Skills: Expertise in Python backend services development, strong understanding of REST API integration principles, experience with CI/CD workflows and tools, ability to create web automation solutions, and familiarity with orchestrating LLMs and AI agents.
• Bonus: Candidates with relevant professional or top-tier internship experience are preferred.