Engineering Intern – Big Data Platform

Job Description

Internship, Software Engineer, Data Platforms (Fall 2026) | Tesla

The Tone:
This is an internship at Tesla, located in Palo Alto, CA. Tesla is a leading company at the forefront of electric vehicles, energy solutions, and artificial intelligence, deeply embedding data into its product and engineering culture. This role is critical for building and operating the big data platform, which supports hundreds of Tesla engineers daily and improves the functionality of cars, chargers, and batteries worldwide. Your work will directly contribute to enabling data-driven solutions across the company.

The TL;DR
• Role: Internship
• Type: Full-time, 40 hours/week, minimum 12 weeks
• Location: In-person, Palo Alto, CA
• Pay: $40–$56 hourly
• Team: A small but fast-growing team building and operating the big data platform for the company.
• Mission: Deliver new and improved big data services and infrastructure to affect hundreds of Tesla engineers daily and improve car, charger, and battery functionality worldwide.
• Tech Stack: Spark, Trino, Kafka, Kubernetes

What You’ll Actually Do
• Improve: Employ and enhance industry-leading, scalable, distributed open-source technologies for data platforms.
• Build: Construct back-end systems from scratch designed to handle over a trillion events daily.
• Operate: Facilitate the operation of highly available distributed systems at scale across multiple locations.
• Define: Help shape a data platform that is highly leveraged, multi-tenant, and self-serviced for internal use.
• Enable: Work with data engineers and data scientists to drive efficient solutions from the data platform.

The Must-Haves
• Background: Actively pursuing a degree in Computer Science or a related field, with an expected graduation date between 2026 and 2027.
• Experience: Experience with cloud infrastructure, specifically AWS.
• Skills: Proficiency in Java, Python, or Scala. Strong programming fundamentals, particularly in data structures, concurrency, and Java.
• Bonus: DevOps/SRE abilities. Understanding of complex distributed systems such as Kafka, Spark, HBase, or ElasticSearch. Previous experience building and optimizing highly available, scalable, distributed back-end services.