Summer Intern, Platform Engineering

Outfront Media•New York, NY

About The Position

This isn't a shadowing internship. We're hiring a Platform Engineering Intern to join the team that builds the services and infrastructure powering OUTFRONT's advertising platform — inventory, orders, product catalog, the systems that hundreds of millions of advertising dollars flow through every year. By the end of the summer, you'll have one production change shipped to a real backend service and one meaningful platform contribution (a developer tool, an internal API, or an infrastructure improvement) that other engineers at OUTFRONT use. You'll write real code, participate in real design discussions, and learn how production engineering actually works at scale — code reviews, CI/CD, observability, secure coding, the boring-but-essential stuff that separates engineers who ship from engineers who don't. You'll also work alongside our AI & Automation team and our internal AI platform (OUTGPT, built on the Vercel AI SDK and AWS Bedrock), and you'll be expected to use modern AI-assisted development tools (Claude Code, Cursor) as part of how you build. You'll join one other intern in OTS (on our AI & Automation team) as a 2-person cohort with shared demo day at the end of the summer. Strong performers will be considered for full-time conversion to engineering roles within OTS.

Requirements

Currently pursuing a Bachelor's or Master's in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field. Rising junior or rising senior preferred.
Hands-on programming experience in Python, Java, Go, or TypeScript/Node — through internships, capstone projects, research, or substantial personal projects on GitHub. Coursework counts; side projects count more.
Solid CS fundamentals: data structures, algorithms, debugging. You can reason about a problem, not just pattern-match to one you've seen.
Comfort with Git, pull requests, and collaborative development. You've worked on code with other people.
Basic understanding of APIs and how services communicate over HTTP. You've consumed a REST API and know what JSON is.
Interest in cloud and backend systems. Familiarity with AWS, Azure, or GCP is a plus; you don't need to be a cloud expert, but you should know what a Lambda is.
You've used AI tools (Claude, Cursor, Copilot, Claude Code, ChatGPT) as part of how you write code. You don't need to be an LLM expert; you do need to be comfortable building with these tools.
You're a builder. You ship things, you debug your own bugs, and you sweat the details that turn working code into production code.
Strong written and verbal communication. You can explain technical work to a non-technical audience and ask good questions when you're stuck.

Nice To Haves

A GitHub or portfolio with projects we can actually look at.
Exposure to scalable systems concepts: microservices, message queues, caching, database design.
Familiarity with Docker, Kubernetes, or cloud-native databases.
Experience with REST and/or gRPC API design, or interest in learning.
Basic security or privacy awareness.
Familiarity with observability tools (logging, metrics, tracing).
Interest in advertising technology, media, or marketing platforms.

Responsibilities

Ship a production backend change. Pair with your mentor on a real service or API improvement that affects how OUTFRONT's platform operates. Build it. Test it. Ship it. Watch it run.
Build a meaningful platform contribution. A developer tool, an internal API, an observability improvement, or an infrastructure component that other engineers actually use. Demo what you built to technology leadership at the end of the summer.
Learn how production engineering works. Code reviews, paired programming, CI/CD pipelines, observability and monitoring, secure coding practices. The hygiene that makes you a real engineer, not just someone who writes code.
Use AI as part of how you build. We expect engineers (interns included) to use Claude Code, Cursor, and other AI-assisted development tools to accelerate their work. You'll learn how to build with AI, not just how to build software.
Be part of the team. Stand-ups, design discussions, lightweight design docs for the features you own. We'll treat you like an engineer because that's what we want you to become.