- Job title
- Software Engineering Intern (Summer 2026)
- Job location
- San Francisco, CA, US
- Job description
- ### **What You’ll Do**
* **Ship fast:** Own and ship features end-to-end, used by thousands within hours.
* **Scale infra:** Help design and optimize systems that can handle millions of notifications, messages, AI inference at scale, and daily interactions
* **Optimize performance:** Identify bottlenecks, improve reliability, and make Candle feel seamless at scale.
* **Bring 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.
* **User impact:** Every line of code directly affects couples and friends relying on Candle to stay close and stay in touch.
* **Sample 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.
### **Technologies We Use:**
* [React Native](https://expo.dev/) (Expo) and **SwiftUI** for the client facing app (iOS and Android)
* [Convex](https://www.convex.dev/) for the real-time backend (written in Typescript), including all background tasks, queues, cron jobs, and REST APIs
* Anthropic (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.
* Observability: PostHog for feature flags, Amplitude for analytics, and Sentry for error reporting
* Clerk for user auth(z/n)
* We **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!
### **Who We're Looking For:**
* You're a student (or recent grad) excited by **viral consumer products** and **fast shipping cycles**
* You have **strong experience with TypeScript** and mobile frameworks like React Native (Expo). Swift is optional but a plus!
* You get excited by both **backend optimization** and **user-facing polish**, whether you’re speeding up a backend query or refining a feature’s UX
* You’re curious, self-driven, and **relentlessly resourceful**
* **Entrepreneurial background**, have shipped and published apps before (optional but preferred)
* You want your work to matter, to be visible, felt, and **loved by users within hours** of writing it
We 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.
