Startups · AI

Software Engineering Intern (Summer 2026)

Candle · San Francisco, CA, US · On-site

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About Candle

Candle helps friends and couples grow closer daily in just 5 minutes. Backed by Y Combinator.

About the role

Ship fast: Own and ship features end-to-end, used by thousands within hours. Scale infra: Help design and optimize systems that can handle millions of notifications, messages, AI inference at scale, and daily interactions

What they're looking for

  • You're a student (or recent grad) excited by viral consumer products and fast shipping cycles
  • You have strong experience with TypeScript and mobile frameworks like React Native (Expo). Swift is optional but a plus!
  • You get excited by both backend optimization and user-facing polish , whether you’re speeding up a backend query or refining a feature’s UX
  • You’re curious, self-driven, and relentlessly resourceful
  • You want your work to matter, to be visible, felt, and loved by users within hours of writing it
More about this role

Ship fast: Own and ship features end-to-end, used by thousands within hours.

Scale infra: Help design and optimize systems that can handle millions of notifications, messages, AI inference at scale, and daily interactions

Optimize performance: Identify bottlenecks, improve reliability, and make Candle feel seamless at scale.

Bring perspective: You’ll work directly with founders and exited founders (Apple, Twitter, NASA engineers, Forbes 30u30 ), contributing new ideas and white boarding solutions to hard problems.

User impact: Every line of code directly affects couples and friends relying on Candle to stay close and stay in touch.

Sample projects of what you could be working on include: overhauling our entire daily notification jobs into a separate reliable microservice, designing and implementing real-time features like a collaborative canvas or a “walkie talkie” feature, creating a recommendation algorithm to dynamically suggest content for couples to explore (this one would be really useful !), etc.

React Native (Expo) and SwiftUI for the client facing app (iOS and Android)

Convex for the real-time backend (written in Typescript), including all background tasks, queues, cron...

Read the full posting on Candle's site ↗

Engineering

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