Software Engineer Intern, Chipforge

Remote (Australia-based / Singapore-based) · Full time

About us

Chipforge is the platform that takes you from design intent to working, verified register-transfer level (RTL) hardware, starting with FPGAs and expanding to ASICs, cutting out the time, iteration cost, and tool complexity of doing it the traditional way.

About the role

Rather than shadowing a team, you will own one narrow slice of the platform and go deep on it. It is real, verifiable work with customers on the other end of it, and everything you build ships.

You will report to the engineer who owns infrastructure and CI, and you will be joining Chipforge at an early stage. We are looking for someone who can find their way around a codebase they didn’t write, is comfortable in a terminal, and is genuinely interested in figuring things out even when the answer isn’t obvious. Prior exposure to chip design or AI is helpful but neither is a dealbreaker. What matters most is how you think and how quickly you learn.

This is a part-time, hybrid role based in Australia or Singapore. It requires a minimum of three days per week, with five hours strongly preferred, for a minimum term of five months.

▍ MAIN DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

- Ship real changes across all repositories from your first few weeks, learning the review bar and the release process by going through them rather than reading about them.
- Fix small, self-contained bugs through the full stack, and correct gaps in the developer documentation as you hit them.
- Build and maintain test environments that let the system run and be validated with no external cloud dependencies, including mock services,



end-to-end coverage around authentication, and CI that can fully validate the software in isolation.
- Help create and maintain a fully offline version of the product, configuring it to run locally and verifying it works with no internet access.
- Contribute to the next iteration of the core product through the full stack, including new features and integrations.
- Write documentation as part of the work rather than at the end, and keep pull requests reviewable by someone who wasn’t there.
- Communicate blockers, uncertainties and surprising results early, because the team can only help with what it knows about.
- Contribute outside your core role when the team needs it

▍ SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE

Qualifications

Currently studying towards a degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering or a related discipline, or recently completed one.

Experience

- No professional experience required. Personal projects, coursework, open-source contributions and hackathon builds are all valid evidence.
- Something you have built end to end that another person actually used. Evidence of finishing counts for more than evidence of coursework.
- Any CI exposure, even GitHub Actions on a personal repository within personal/team projects or prior internships




- Postgres or any real SQL database (schema, indexes, migrations) within projects or prior internships
- Digital design or HDL coursework (Verilog, VHDL, SystemVerilog) or an FPGA project is a genuine advantage, but not required
- Exposure to running LLMs locally (Ollama, vLLM, llama.cpp), or to Kubernetes or Terraform, is a plus

Skills

- Confident in one of Python, Go or TypeScript, and willing to be uncomfortable in the other two. All three are in play from week one, and depth in one beats shallowness in three.
- Comfortable in Linux and the terminal, with Docker and docker compose specifically. Terraform, Kubernetes and AWS infrastructure experience is a plus
- Git fluency beyond commit and push: branches, rebase, reading a diff, resolving conflicts, guided code reviews.
- The ability to read code you didn't write and work out what it does before changing it.
- Clear written communication.
- Basic networking literacy (ports, DNS, TLS, what "loopback only" means, why egress matters) is a genuine advantage
- AI Engineering/Architecture experience or knowledge is a plus, but not required.

What is explicitly not required: years of experience, a prior industry internship, distributed systems theory. ▍ THIS ROLE IS FOR YOU IF ...

You want to own something real rather than pick tickets off someone else's board. You would rather be the person who can prove the system works offline than the person who assumes it does. You take it well when someone more experienced tells you your approach is wrong, and you try again. If that's you, let's talk.

📌 Software Engineer Intern (Australia)
🏢 Chipforge.ai
📍 Australia