Software Engineering Intern, Backend & Data Platform

Remote from India | 6-month paid internship | USD 500-1,000/month | Potential full-time opportunity

Hubble is an Amazon advertising analytics and management platform being built by the team behind Headline, an Australian agency managing significant Amazon and Walmart advertising budgets across the US and Europe.

We are looking for a Software Engineering Intern who wants to learn how real backend and data systems are built, tested, and operated.

This is not a disguised junior-engineer role, and we will not expect you to independently own our backend, infrastructure, production incidents, or customer data. You will work on clearly scoped engineering problems with regular guidance, code reviews, and technical supervision.

At the same time, this is not an observational internship. You will write code, work inside a real product, contribute to production-quality systems, and gradually take ownership of small, well-defined projects as you demonstrate readiness.

What you will work on

Your work will sit around Hubble's backend and data platform.

Depending on your progress, projects may include:

- Building small backend features and internal APIs.
- Writing data-validation and reconciliation tools for advertising data.
- Improving automated tests for data-ingestion pipelines.
- Creating scripts that identify missing, duplicate, late, or inconsistent data.
- Building internal tools that help our team inspect jobs, reports, and system health.
- Improving logs, monitoring, alerts, and debugging information.
- Investigating slow SQL queries and testing potential improvements.
- Supporting integrations with external APIs such as Amazon Ads.
- Writing explicit technical documentation and operational runbooks.
- Fixing small, well-defined bugs with guidance from the engineering team.
- Helping us evaluate and safely use AI-assisted development workflows.

You may work with technologies such as Python or Go, SQL, ClickHouse, BigQuery, APIs, Docker, queues, and cloud infrastructure. You are not expected to know all of these before joining.

What you should already know

We are looking for strong fundamentals rather than years of qualified experience.

You should be comfortable with:

- Programming in at least one backend language, preferably Python or Go.
- Basic SQL, including joins, grouping, filtering, and working with relational data.
- Git and normal version-control workflows.
- Basic HTTP and API concepts.
- Reading unfamiliar code and debugging simple problems.
- Breaking a larger problem into smaller steps.
- Explaining what you tried, what failed, and how you investigated it.

You should also have built at least one meaningful technical project. This could be:
- A university project.
- A personal project.
- An internship project.
- An open-source contribution.
- A freelance project.
- A private project you can explain in detail without sharing confidential material.

A public GitHub profile is helpful but not required.

What we do not expect

You do not need

- Previous ClickHouse or BigQuery experience.
- Professional experience with Amazon Ads.
- Kubernetes expertise.
- Experience operating large distributed systems.
- Prior on-call experience.
- Perfect English.
- A computer science degree, provided your fundamentals are strong.
- The ability to design an entire production architecture independently.

We care more about how you learn, reason, test,



and respond to feedback than how many tools you can list.

What we will teach you

During the internship, you will receive practical exposure to:

- Designing reliable backend services.
- Working with production-quality APIs.
- Data ingestion, retries, idempotency, and deduplication.
- Analytical databases and columnar data stores.
- Safe schema changes and data migrations.
- Writing useful automated tests.
- Debugging failures using logs, metrics, and traces.
- Code reviews and collaborative engineering workflows.
- Docker, CI, deployments, and basic production operations.
- Performance investigation and query optimization.
- Data correctness and reconciliation.
- Responsible AI-assisted software development.
- How product and customer requirements influence engineering decisions.

The goal is not for you to become an expert in every area within six months. The goal is for you to develop strong professional engineering habits and become capable of owning small backend projects safely with appropriate review.

Supervision and support

You will report to Hubble's technical lead and work with the existing development team and founders.

You can expect

- Structured onboarding.
- A clearly assigned supervisor.
- Regular one-to-one feedback.
- Frequent support during the first month.
- A written scope for each project.
- Code review before production changes are merged.
- Help understanding the product and architecture.
- Regular technical discussions and learning sessions.
- A monthly progress review against agreed expectations.

During the early part of the internship, every meaningful code change will be reviewed closely. As you demonstrate good judgment and consistency, you will receive more freedom over implementation decisions.

What you may own

By the middle or later stages of the internship, you may independently drive:

- A small internal tool.
- A contained API endpoint.
- A data-quality checker.
- A test suite for one component.
- A monitoring or observability improvement.
- A small non-critical pipeline component.
- A clearly defined bug fix or performance investigation.
- Documentation for a system you have worked on.

"Own" means understanding the requirement, proposing an approach, implementing it, testing it, responding to review comments, documenting it, and following it through to completion.

A senior engineer will still review important technical decisions and any production deployment.

What you will not own independently

As an intern, you will not be solely responsible for:

- Hubble's overall backend architecture.
- Production infrastructure.
- Security or access-control decisions.
- Customer-data migrations.
- Unreviewed production deployments.
- Major database-schema changes.
- Responding to production incidents alone.
- On-call coverage.
- Advertising-budget changes or other customer-impacting automated actions.
- Making irreversible changes to production systems.
- Selecting major technologies without senior review.

You may observe or assist with some of these areas as a learning opportunity, but responsibility will remain with an experienced engineer.





How performance will be assessed

You will not be evaluated based on lines of code, how frequently you appear online, or whether AI helped you write something.

We will assess

- Learning speed: Do you apply feedback and avoid repeating the same mistakes?
- Technical fundamentals: Can you understand the code, data, and systems you are changing?
- Correctness: Do you test your work and consider failure cases?
- Reliability: Do you complete agreed work and communicate early when blocked?
- Code quality: Is your work understandable, maintainable, and appropriately scoped?
- Ownership: Can you take a clearly defined task from requirement to completion?
- Judgment: Do you ask for help before making risky or irreversible changes?
- AI verification: Do you review, test, and understand AI-generated output?
- Communication: Can you explain decisions, trade-offs, and uncertainty clearly?
- Collaboration: Do you respond constructively to review and work well with the team?
- Data responsibility: Do you handle customer and company information carefully?

You will receive feedback throughout the internship rather than only at the end.

Compensation and working arrangement

- Six-month paid internship.
- USD 500-1,000 per month, depending on current capability, project experience, and the level of work you can initially handle.
- Remote from India.
- Full-time internship.
- At least four hours of daily overlap with the Berlin workday.
- The expected working schedule and availability will be agreed before the internship begins.
- You will need a reliable computer and internet connection suitable for software development.

The internship does not guarantee a permanent role.

Strong performance may lead to a discussion about a full-time position, but any offer would depend on performance, mutual fit, an available role, Hubble's hiring needs, and the company's budget and business position at that time.

Possibility of a full-time role

Strong performance may lead to a discussion about a full-time role after the internship, but conversion is not guaranteed.

A full-time offer would depend on:

- Consistent performance across the internship.
- Demonstrated ability to own small production-quality projects with appropriate review.
- Strong engineering fundamentals and responsible judgment.
- Reliability and communication.
- Positive feedback from the technical team.
- Mutual interest in continuing.
- Hubble's hiring needs, budget, and business position at that time.
- An appropriate full-time position being available.

Completing the internship alone does not create an automatic right to a full-time role.

How to apply

Apply here: https://apply.headlinema.com/apply/software-engineering-intern

Please include

- Your CV or LinkedIn profile.
- A short description of the most meaningful technical project you have worked on.
- What you personally built or contributed.
- One technical problem you found difficult and how you approached it.
- Any relevant GitHub, portfolio, article, demo, or project link, if available.
- Your current location, availability, and expected graduation date, where applicable.

No cover letter is required.

We welcome final-year students, recent graduates, self-taught developers, and candidates with previous internship experience. What matters is that you have solid fundamentals, evidence that you have built something, and a genuine interest in backend and data engineering.

📌 Software Engineer Intern (India)
🏢 Headline
📍 India