High School Internship, Software Engineering

About the Role

This is a small, selective internship for exceptional high school students graduating in 2027 or later. You will spend 12 consecutive weeks between May and August working in person from Stripe’s San Francisco or Seattle office on a scoped engineering project. This is not a trainee or classroom-based program; you will be expected to contribute to your team’s work, learn quickly, communicate clearly, ask strong questions, and produce work that holds up under technical review. Strong performance may lead to consideration for future opportunities at Stripe.

Key Responsibilities

• Participate fully in team discussions, decisions, and the technical design process.
• Write, test, and document software intended for production use.
• Give and receive technical feedback through code reviews and design discussions.
• Collaborate with engineers and cross-functional partners.
• Learn unfamiliar systems through independent research and work with a manager, mentor, teammates, and subject matter experts.
• Communicate the status of your work clearly, including progress, risks, and open questions.
• Use current AI development tools thoughtfully, applying rigorous judgment.

Requirements & Tech Stack

• Currently enrolled in high school, or graduating before the internship begins.
• Available to work full-time and in person for 12 consecutive weeks between May and August 2027.
• Experience programming through independent projects, research, coursework, competitions, open source contributions, a startup, or another setting.
• We work mostly in Ruby, Java, JavaScript, Go, and Scala.
• Evidence of exceptional technical achievement for your stage.
• Ability to explain your individual contribution to your work.
• Experience working with others on a technical project and incorporating feedback.
• Ability to learn unfamiliar systems through independent research and work with a mentor or subject matter expert.
• Clear written and verbal communication.
• Ability to meet employment eligibility requirements for the role’s location.

Qualifications

• Ambitious builder: Energized by building solutions without a clear precedent and working through difficult technical problems, showing unusual initiative, depth, or originality.
• Rigorous thinker: Cares about whether work is correct, tests assumptions, examines edge cases, and can explain technical choices.
• Adaptable problem solver: Learns quickly, responds well to feedback, and keeps making progress when the path is unclear.
• Collaborative teammate: Communicates clearly, treats others with kindness, and knows when to work independently and when to ask for help.

Preferred Qualifications

• Deeper technical knowledge in areas like frontend, backend, infrastructure, data, machine learning, security, or developer tools.
• Experience writing high-quality pull requests, tests, technical documentation, or design notes.
• Familiarity navigating an unfamiliar codebase or contributing to a multi-person project.
• A record of sustained technical work over time.
• Curiosity about how businesses operate and how software can improve economic growth.

What to Submit

• A resume or short summary of your technical experience.
• One or two examples of your strongest work (repository, live product, technical paper, etc.).
• For each example, a short explanation of the problem, your contribution, the hardest technical decision, how you tested the work, and what you learned.
• Optional: High school transcript, standardized test scores.