{"id":142133,"url":"https://alion.io/job/candle-software-engineering-intern-summer-2026","title":"Software Engineering Intern (Summer 2026)","company":{"id":8265,"name":"Candle","domain":"trycandle.app","url":"https://alion.io/company/candle","size_band":null,"is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Work at a Startup","truth_index":null},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"intern","employment_type":"internship","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["San Francisco, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":6500,"max":9000,"currency":"USD","period":"month","gross":null,"usd_annual":108000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"Claude","optional":false},{"name":"Claude Code","optional":false},{"name":"Cursor","optional":false},{"name":"Expo","optional":false},{"name":"React Native","optional":false},{"name":"Sentry","optional":false},{"name":"TypeScript","optional":false},{"name":"Anthropic","optional":true},{"name":"Gemini","optional":true},{"name":"Git","optional":true},{"name":"GPT-5","optional":true},{"name":"JavaScript","optional":true},{"name":"OpenAI","optional":true},{"name":"React.js","optional":true},{"name":"Replicate","optional":true},{"name":"Rest API","optional":true},{"name":"Swift","optional":true},{"name":"SwiftUI","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-08-28T01:21:32Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-14","last_verified_at":"2026-10-17T08:25:37Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":50,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":50},"description":"What You’ll Do\nShip fast: Own and ship features end-to-end, used by thousands within hours.\n\nScale infra: Help design and optimize systems that can handle millions of notifications, messages, AI inference at scale, and daily interactions\n\nOptimize performance: Identify bottlenecks, improve reliability, and make Candle feel seamless at scale.\n\nBring perspective: You’ll work directly with founders and exited founders (Apple, Twitter, NASA engineers, Forbes 30u30 ), contributing new ideas and white boarding solutions to hard problems.\n\nUser impact: Every line of code directly affects couples and friends relying on Candle to stay close and stay in touch. \n\nSample projects of what you could be working on include: overhauling our entire daily notification jobs into a separate reliable microservice, designing and implementing real-time features like a collaborative canvas or a “walkie talkie” feature, creating a recommendation algorithm to dynamically suggest content for couples to explore (this one would be really useful!), etc.\n\nTechnologies We Use:\nReact Native (Expo) and SwiftUI for the client facing app (iOS and Android)\n\nConvex for the real-time backend (written in Typescript), including all background tasks, queues, cron jobs, and REST APIs\n\nAnthropic (Claude Opus 4.6), OpenAI (GPT 5.2), and Gemini models to create background agents for tasks like finding local date ideas. We also use Replicate for some image gen models.\nObservability: PostHog for feature flags, Amplitude for analytics, and Sentry for error reporting\nClerk for user auth(z/n)\nWe strongly encourage all candidates to have their own AI setup of choice when coding (Claude Code, Cursor, etc.) to ship faster. Bonus points if you know how to use Git worktrees to speed up your workflow!\nWho We're Looking For:\nYou're a student (or recent grad) excited by viral consumer products and fast shipping cycles\nYou have strong experience with TypeScript and mobile frameworks like React Native (Expo). Swift is optional but a plus!\nYou get excited by both backend optimization and user-facing polish, whether you’re speeding up a backend query or refining a feature’s UX \nYou’re curious, self-driven, and relentlessly resourceful\nEntrepreneurial background, have shipped and published apps before (optional but preferred)\n\nYou want your work to matter, to be visible, felt, and loved by users within hours of writing it\nWe work hybrid in San Francisco, 3 days a week in person and the remaining remotely. You’ll move fast in this internship, break things, and learn more in a few months than most people do in a year. But if you’re the kind of builder who dreams of taking a product from 800k → 5M users by end of 2026, this will be one of the most exciting chapters of your career.\n30 min phone screen with CTO: More of an informal call to get to know more about the role, and for you to evaluate whether it’s a good fit for you.\n\n30 min technical screen: We’ll go over a fun technical problem together where you’ll be asked to code in your editor of choice and share screens. This is meant to be collaborative and to see how you think through hard problems. Stronger focus on data structures, algorithms, and overall software design principles here.\n\n24-hr take home exercise: This will be a take home exercise intended to gauge your creativity and ability to create user-facing features. Strong emphasis on design, user experience, and aesthetics.\n\nVirtual Onsite: We’ll go over a technical question and a design question. We’ll also casually have you walk us through some of your favorite projects. You’ll get to meet the founders and see if it’s a culture fit for you! This can happen in person (preferred) or virtually on Google Meet.\n\n Offer!","description_format":"text","description_chars":3730,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Dating & Relationships","Custom Software Development"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-08-28T01:21:32Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":9,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.333,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":50,"expected_fill_days":23,"reasons":["conf:0","win:tail","crowd:junior"],"computed_at":"2026-10-17T05:46:00Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":108000,"is_top_pay":false},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/candle-software-engineering-intern-summer-2026","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/candle-software-engineering-intern-summer-2026.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-17T10:45:16Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":14025,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-18T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":8265},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=8265"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fcandle-software-engineering-intern-summer-2026"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fcandle-software-engineering-intern-summer-2026"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fcandle-software-engineering-intern-summer-2026"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/candle-software-engineering-intern-summer-2026\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fcandle-software-engineering-intern-summer-2026"}]}