Hardware Systems Architecture Intern, Performance & Workload Analysis

Meta • Redmond, WA

4d • $6,688 - $11,880

About The Position

Reality Labs' Systems Engineering team shapes the hardware architecture of future devices, including VR/MR headsets and AI wearables. The intern will help translate user experiences and workloads into quantitative hardware requirements across compute, memory, storage, power, and thermal, and contribute to trade studies that inform silicon and platform decisions. The intern will be paired with a mentor and own a scoped project that contributes to a real platform definition. This is a 12-week internship.

Requirements

• Currently pursuing a Master's degree or higher in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related field.
• Coursework or research experience in computer architecture, SoC design, or embedded systems, including memory hierarchy, interconnects, and power management.
• Experience with quantitative modeling and data analysis in C++, Python, or MATLAB.
• Intent to return to a full-time degree program after completing the internship.
• Must obtain work authorization in the country of employment by the time of hire and maintain ongoing work authorization during employment.

Nice To Haves

• Currently pursuing a PhD in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related field.
• Research or project experience in performance and power modeling, workload characterization, or architectural simulation.
• Hands-on experience with system-level measurement, such as power-rail instrumentation, thermal characterization, or hardware performance counters and profiling tools.
• Familiarity with mobile or embedded SoC platforms, or with AR/VR, camera/ISP, or on-device ML workloads.
• Experience communicating quantitative analysis to cross-functional engineering partners.

Responsibilities

• Translate target use cases into hardware requirements, budgeting compute, memory bandwidth, storage throughput, power, and thermal for experiences such as mixed-reality passthrough, an always-on AI assistant, and camera capture.
• Contribute to architecture trade studies comparing SoC, memory, storage, and ISP options against performance, power, thermal, cost, and form-factor limits, using analytical models validated against measurements.
• Measure platform behavior under load at the system level using power-rail instrumentation, thermal chambers, and hardware performance counters, and use the data to calibrate models.
• Identify where performance is capped by hardware, such as memory bandwidth, power delivery, thermal headroom, or I/O, rather than software.
• Characterize how requirements shift across product classes, from tethered or high-power headsets to battery-limited wearables.
• Present findings to silicon, hardware, and product leads, and document results for supplier evaluations and next-generation platform definitions.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Intern