Backend Engineer Intern (Fall semester)

This is for Fall semester 2026!

How to apply

Email hiring@getquikturn.io with your resume and your GitHub profile or a link to something you have built. In a few sentences, tell us about a project you’ve built, why you built it, and how you built it. Please do not send a cover letter.

About Quikturn

Quikturn is the AI-native platform investment bankers, consultants, finance teams, and corporate teams use to build PowerPoint decks. We deliver millions of company logos, deal data, and market and company intelligence through a web app, a native PowerPoint add-in, and an API as a Service (APIaaS).

Our AI deck engine builds complete, draft-ready market maps, sector research reports, pitch decks, and deal materials such as CIPs, CIMs, and teasers in minutes. The intelligence layer behind it covers millions of companies, deals, and investors, replacing much of the manual research, retrieval, and assembly work behind every deck.

We are a small founding team moving quickly and closing our first enterprise deals. Interns own real systems and production work, but they do not work without support: you will receive direct context, code review, and feedback from the founders while being trusted to make meaningful engineering decisions.

The role

You will work across the backend systems that power Quikturn’s web app, PowerPoint add-in, AI deck engine, intelligence products, and APIaaS.

This is backend product engineering and not infrastructure for its own sake. The systems you build should make a customer workflow faster, more accurate, easier to integrate, or more reliable. You will be expected to understand that workflow, not only the service that implements it.

What you may own and build

• Core product APIs: Design and implement endpoints and business logic for companies, logos, deals, investors, market intelligence, deck generation, workspaces, templates, organizations, and user workflows.
• AI deck orchestration: Build the backend path from a user’s request to a generation plan, asynchronous work, stored output, progress reporting, and a PowerPoint file the user can review and edit.
• Company and deal intelligence: Serve structured data and semantic discovery across millions of entities while keeping contracts stable for the web app, add-in, and external developers.
• Data models and migrations: Evolve relational schemas safely as the product gains new workflows, relationships, and enterprise requirements.
• Authentication and authorization: Design secure access across the web app, PowerPoint add-in, enterprise organizations, internal services, and API customers.
• Asynchronous processing: Build durable workflows for generation, enrichment, indexing, classification, asset processing, notifications, and other long-running work.
• Search and retrieval: Improve company and logo discovery, indexing, and fallback behavior when upstream data is incomplete or imperfect.
• Logo APIaaS and edge delivery: Build reliable, low-latency delivery for logos and company data across external products and high-volume customer use.
• Reliability and observability: Add the metrics, logs, traces, health checks, alerts, and failure handling needed to understand production behavior before a customer has to explain it to us.

What you will do

• Take a backend problem from customer or product context through design, implementation, rollout, and production observation.
• Define clear request and response contracts, validate inputs, and keep authorization decisions close to the data they protect.
• Write and review database migrations with backward compatibility and live data in mind.
• Design queue jobs that are safe to retry, visible when they fail, and resistant to silently losing work.
• Investigate performance and correctness across service boundaries instead of patching the first visible symptom.
• Write focused tests for permissions, data invariants, failure paths, and other behavior where a regression would be expensive.
• Use autonomous developer agents such as Claude Code to increase leverage: scope the task, provide the right context, review the implementation, and own the final technical judgment.
• Participate in direct, thoughtful code review with the founders and the rest of the engineering team.

Technology

We work primarily with TypeScript and Node.js, supported by SQL databases, asynchronous job systems, search infrastructure, and Cloudflare edge services. Strong server-side fundamentals in another language or framework transfer well. There may also be opportunities to explore Rust for selected lower-level work; Rust experience is not required.

What we are looking for

• You are a current undergraduate student.
• You have built and deployed a backend, API, data service, or full-stack application outside of a toy tutorial.
• You understand the fundamentals of HTTP, relational data modeling, authentication, and asynchronous processing.
• You can explain what happens when a request partially fails, a job runs twice, a cache is stale, or two operations update the same data.
• You read documentation and investigate evidence instead of coding from assumptions.
• You can work independently after receiving context while still asking for help before uncertainty becomes wasted work.
• You care about the product behavior created by your backend decisions.

Helpful, not required

• Experience building and deploying a backend, data service, or public API.
• Familiarity with asynchronous processing, search, object storage, or edge computing.
• Exposure to authentication, authorization, multi-tenant systems, billing or usage metering, or public APIs.
• Experience with web crawling, data enrichment, LLM-backed extraction, or presentation generation.
• Experience directing AI coding agents and critically reviewing their output.
• Interest in Rust or lower-level systems work.

Internship details

• Type: Semi-paid, temporary/seasonal internship
• Eligibility: Current undergraduate students only. Not open to graduate or master’s seeking students.
• Location: Remote, or hybrid in New York City
• Schedule: Part-time, 15-30 hours per week
• Compensation: Intern revenue-split compensation pool
• Work-Study program: No