Software Engineering (Cloud Computing) Intern

About the Role

• Role: Software Engineering Intern, Cloud Computing & Infrastructure
• Company: Prox
• Location: Remote, U.S.-based
• Compensation: Unpaid / School Credit, subject to school requirements
• Commitment: 20+ hours/week (minimum)
• Duration: 10+ weeks
• Start Date: ASAP
• Reports to: Founder & CEO

About Prox

Prox is building tools to help shoppers compare grocery prices, discover local deals, and understand where their entire basket costs the least. We are an early-stage consumer technology startup.

What You'll Own

Your primary objective will be to help make Prox’s infrastructure more reliable, scalable, and cost efficient. You will take ownership of clearly scoped projects, investigate technical problems, propose improvements, and work with the team to implement and validate changes.

Key Responsibilities

Cloud Infrastructure & Architecture

• Map existing services, infrastructure, dependencies, and data flows.
• Help evaluate and improve cloud hosting, compute, storage, and service configurations.
• Support containerized applications, background workers, and scheduled workloads.
• Identify infrastructure bottlenecks and potential points of failure.
• Compare technical approaches and explain their tradeoffs across performance, reliability, complexity, and cost.
• Collaborate with the founder and engineering team on infrastructure priorities and implementation plans.

Reliability, Monitoring & Performance

• Improve monitoring, logging, dashboards, and alerts for application services, databases, and data pipelines.
• Investigate slow requests, failed jobs, timeouts, and resource constraints.
• Help improve retries, error handling, and recovery procedures.
• Track measures such as response times, job completion rates, data freshness, and infrastructure utilization.
• Measure performance before and after changes to confirm whether an improvement worked.
• Document recurring issues and help address their underlying causes.

Data Pipelines & Database Infrastructure

• Support workflows for data ingestion, scraping, processing, and storage.
• Help improve how background jobs are scheduled, coordinated, and monitored.
• Identify ways to process large workloads without unnecessarily slowing customer-facing services.
• Assist with database performance investigations, including queries, indexes, connections, and batch operations.
• Help identify incomplete loads, stale data, and failed processing steps.
• Work with the team to make data workflows easier to maintain and recover when something goes wrong.

Deployments, Automation & Cloud Costs

• Improve deployment pipelines, environment configuration, and development workflows.
• Support Docker, CI/CD, and automated deployment processes.
• Automate repetitive operational tasks and checks.
• Review resource usage and identify opportunities to reduce unnecessary cloud spending.
• Help evaluate when workloads should scale up, scale down, or run on a schedule.
• Support appropriate access controls, secrets management, backup procedures, and rollback planning.
• Create practical documentation, architecture diagrams, and runbooks.

Requirements & Tech Stack

• Technical curiosity, strong problem-solving skills, sound judgment, and the ability to follow through.
• Familiarity with at least one cloud platform, such as AWS, GCP, or Azure.
• Understand the basics of APIs, databases, application deployment, and how backend services work together.
• Comfortable writing code or scripts in a language such as Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, or Bash.
• Comfortable using Git, reading technical documentation, and investigating unfamiliar systems.
• Approach problems methodically, test your assumptions, and explain how you reached a conclusion.
• Communicate clearly about progress, blockers, technical decisions, and next steps.
• Responsive, reliable, and capable of working independently while knowing when to ask for help.
• Excited about working directly with a startup founder and contributing to an evolving product.
• Based in the United States and able to commit at least 20 hours per week.

Qualifications

• Current student, recent graduate, or early-career candidate with relevant coursework, projects, or practical experience.
• Interest in cloud architecture, backend systems, DevOps, or infrastructure engineering.

Preferred Experience (A Plus)

• AWS services for compute, storage, containers, or monitoring.
• Docker and containerized applications.
• GitHub Actions or other CI/CD tools.
• PostgreSQL, Supabase, Redis, or related database and caching technologies.
• Monitoring and logging platforms such as Grafana or CloudWatch.
• Linux, networking fundamentals, and cloud permissions.
• Infrastructure as code, such as Terraform or AWS CDK.
• Data pipelines, background jobs, queues, or scraping infrastructure.
• Performance optimization, troubleshooting, or cloud cost analysis.
• Side projects, technical internships, or experience working in a startup environment.

Relevant experience can come from coursework, personal projects, research, internships, or other hands-on work. You do not need experience with every tool listed.