Design Engineering Intern

/ Engineering, Design/ NYC/ Intern/ $55/hour

a note from aaron

Come work with me! I'm having fun at work and want you to have fun too.

Short and sweet — my team at TextQL is looking for a design intern. Someone who wants to build, not just hand off mocks. Someone excited by messy real-world systems who wants to make them feel simple. Someone who gets excited at the opportunity to redefine HCI and HAI (human agent interaction).

We're building ambitious software, hopefully the last software that an enterprise will ever deploy. The thing we need to build doesn't have an obvious precedent.

You'll make mistakes. You'll be uncomfortable in new spaces. You'll be asked to move quickly, make decisions with incomplete information, and take responsibility for things you've never done before.

But this is the kind of work where you grow quickly because there's nowhere to hide. Your fingerprints and hands are all over your work, and you'll be able to point to things that exist because you made them happen.

If that sounds fun, message me. I'd love to convince you to join.

Aaron

TextQL builds AI agents and software that enterprises use to drive critical decisions on their data — and pushes the unit cost of those decisions toward zero. By putting everything a company knows behind every question, our platform closes a quarter's books 140× faster, answers two thousand operational questions a week, and helps care networks decide better for millions of patients. Blackstone, Amazon, Ring, Scale AI, and Lumeris rely on us to make better decisions, faster. We're looking for a design intern who wants to shape how humans and AI agents collaborate on complex data problems — creating interfaces that make enterprise data accessible, trustworthy, and actionable.

Product Design

Do you obsess over interaction patterns that feel inevitable in hindsight? Have you designed something where the UI practically disappears?

You'll work as a full member of the technical staff, not an intern track: real screens, real design system work, on the same product Fortune 500 customers touch — with a designer beside you and no busywork between you and production.

What Success Looks Like

  • Within 2 weeks, you'll have shipped a design that customers see
  • By the end of the internship, you'll own a surface end-to-end — design, build, ship — and demo it to the whole company
  • The bar we hire against: interns we'd extend a full-time Member of Technical Staff offer to

About You

  • A portfolio that shows taste — we don't gate on years of experience
  • Experience designing (even in coursework or side projects) complex products, developer tools, or ambitious software
  • Comfortable with ambiguity and rapid iteration
  • Strong systems thinking — you think in components, not one-off screens
  • Comfortable in Figma and comfortable in code: HTML/CSS or a component framework, AI tools count
  • Currently pursuing (or recently finished) a degree in design, HCI, or adjacent — or a story that beats one

Compensation & Logistics

  • Compensation: $55/hour
  • Terms: Fall 2026, Spring 2027, and Summer 2027 — some terms have limited seats and close as they fill, so apply for the earliest you can start
  • Interview: We can make a decision within 72 hours of your on-site. If you're outside NYC, we'll cover all travel expenses.
  • Onsite: We are 5 days a week in-office in FiDI, NYC
  • Perks: Free lunch and dinner, and the rest of the benefits list on the careers page where it applies

If this description resonates, we strongly encourage you to apply.

The Application

We have a very simple, signal-driven process. Please send Salman an email with the following:

  • Your portfolio or 2-3 case studies of your best work
  • Your GitHub and/or LinkedIn

/ trailblazers

The way the world makes decisions — in finance, in healthcare, in government — is being redefined. Not eventually: here, now, at the frontier, by a small team that refuses to follow the old script.

Most careers follow a path someone else cleared. This is for the trailblazers.