Forward Deployed Engineer Intern

About the Role

Opptra is an AI-first company that helps international brands expand into Asia through franchising, licensing, and inventory-led partnerships. As an intern, you will embed directly with Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs), who work at the intersection of business problems and AI infrastructure. FDEs own business outcomes, devise systems to solve them, and build those systems. You will work alongside an FDE on a live workstream, progressing from discovery to shipped code.

Key Responsibilities

• Work on a real agentic workstream with code that runs in production.
• Help design and build LLM-powered workflows, including prompt engineering, tool use, output structuring, and eval loops.
• Write Python scripts and pipelines to connect APIs, process marketplace data, and trigger business actions.
• Build lightweight internal tools such as dashboards, alert systems, and data quality checkers for operational teams.
• Debug, iterate, and improve existing automation from first principles.
• Document your work clearly so others can extend it.

Requirements & Tech Stack

• Strong Python fundamentals with the ability to write clean, working code.
• Genuine curiosity about how LLMs work, including when and when not to use them.
• A problem-first instinct, focusing on identifying the real constraint in a business situation.
• Comfort with ambiguity; ability to ask the right questions and scope work without detailed specifications.
• Hands-on experience with AI tooling such as Claude API, OpenAI, LangChain, or similar. Personal projects are accepted.
• Basic familiarity with SQL or data querying.
• A plus if you've touched BigQuery or any cloud data warehouse.

Qualifications (Apply if...)

• You have built something useful with an LLM.
• You have used AI-assisted dev tools like Cursor or Claude Code in your workflow.
• You have shipped something to a real user, even in a side project or college context.
• You can explain a technical decision clearly to a non-technical stakeholder.

Do Not Apply If...

• You have only used LLMs via a UI and have not written code against an API.
• You rely on a framework before understanding the problem.
• You require detailed specifications to start and ask for more specs when ambiguity arises instead of making a decision.

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.