Design Engineer Intern 2027

About the Role

The Apps@Research team builds the tools that IBM Researchers need to accelerate their work. We are an AI-native team and looking for a design engineer intern who can collaborate with product managers, engineers, and stakeholders to deliver new experiences from sketch to software.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and ship UI work for production applications, from first sketch to merged code.
• Extend our component library and the Storybook that documents it.
• Prototype in code, putting clickable experiences in front of researchers quickly.
• Work alongside AI coding agents as a normal part of the job, and improve how the team runs them.
• Carry IBM Research's voice into the interface, while bringing your own aesthetic judgment.

Requirements & Tech Stack

• A portfolio of design work showing craft: typography, layout, color, motion, interaction states.
• Include at least one project you designed and built and put in front of real users.
• Working knowledge of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and component frameworks.
• Exposure to design systems in practice (component variants, design tokens, documentation).
• Hands-on use of AI coding tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, or v0.
• Specific practices: loop engineering and agent swarms.
• Enough back-end familiarity to feed a front end: Python, Go, or Node.js.

Qualifications

• A point of view about software, and the language to explain why an interface works or fails.
• Evidence you can write in someone else's voice (brand, editorial, or client work).
• Accessibility fundamentals: keyboard navigation, contrast, semantic markup, basic screen reader testing.
• Git, pull requests, and code review.
• Cloud development exposure: containers, Kubernetes or OpenShift.
• Agile development practices.
• Interface writing: empty states, error messages, release notes.