Forward Deployed Engineer Intern

About the Role

Opptra is an AI-first company helping international brands expand into Asia — across India, GCC, and SEA — through franchising, licensing, and inventory-led partnerships. You'll embed directly with our Forward Deployed Engineers — the team that sits at the intersection of business problems and AI infrastructure. As an intern, you'll work alongside an FDE on a live workstream and go from discovery to shipped code.

Key Responsibilities

• Work on a real agentic workstream — not a sandbox project. Your code will run in production.
• Help design and build LLM-powered workflows: prompt engineering, tool use, output structuring, eval loops.
• Write Python scripts and pipelines that connect APIs, process marketplace data, and trigger business actions.
• Build lightweight internal tools — dashboards, alert systems, data quality checkers — that ops teams actually use.
• Debug, iterate, and improve existing automation from first principles.
• Document what you build clearly enough that someone else can extend it without you.

Requirements & Tech Stack

• Strong Python fundamentals.
• Genuine curiosity about how LLMs work.
• Problem-first instinct: Ask "what's the real constraint?" before opening your editor.
• Comfort with ambiguity. You'll need to ask the right questions and scope the work yourself.
• Some hands-on experience with AI tooling — Claude API, OpenAI, LangChain, or similar. Personal projects count.
• Basic familiarity with SQL or data querying. A plus if you've touched BigQuery or any cloud data warehouse.

Qualifications

• You've built something with an LLM that actually does something useful.
• You've used Cursor, Claude Code, or similar AI-assisted dev tools as part of your actual workflow.
• You've shipped something to a real user, even in a side project or college context.
• You can explain a technical decision in plain language to a non-technical stakeholder.

DO NOT APPLY IF

• You've only used LLMs via a UI and haven't written code against an API.
• You reach for a framework before you understand the problem.
• You need detailed requirements to start, and ask for more specs when things get unclear instead of making a call.

What You'll Get

• Direct access to FDEs and the Head of Engineering.
• Real ownership on a production workstream from day one.
• Exposure to agentic system design, marketplace data infrastructure, and eCommerce operations at scale.
• Competitive internship stipend.