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2026 PhD Software Engineer Intern (Kafka), United States

Uber
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We’re looking for PhD candidates to intern on the Kafka team during summer 2026 (12 weeks). You will be embedded in our engineering team and work closely with other specialists, software developers, and product managers. As a PhD intern, you will work on an exciting yet bold problem in depth and independently, under the supervision of an experienced engineer on that team.

 

About the Team

The Kafka team is a part of the Data Infrastructure team. It is responsible for providing a messaging service that is highly available, durable, and provides an end-to-end latency guarantee. Transporting multi-trillion messages a day across tens of thousands of topics (and growing), we are one of the biggest Kafka ecosystems in the world. Within the team, we have four sub-areas: Security and Observability, Core Kafka, Kafka Ecosystem, and Kafka Messaging Platform. Projects include Kafka on Odin, Kafka Tiered Storage, Kafka Security, Ecosystem Manager, Kafka Consumer Proxy, Kafka Client Standardization, Hardcore Efficiency, etc

 

What You'll Do

  • Drive exciting, ambitious, previously unsolved projects from end to end
  • Make data-driven decisions, with exceptional execution
  • Be motivated to own projects and push them forward with independence
  • Work on the internals of Kafka and build features that will help serve our users better.
  • Build services that are part of the Kafka Ecosystem
  • Most importantly, have a passion to make Uber better for our customers

 

Basic Qualifications

  • Currently enrolled in a Ph.D. program studying distributed systems, machine learning or a related engineering field
  • Candidates must have at least one semester/quarter of their education left following the internship

 

Preferred Qualifications

  • Solid understanding of Java for backend / systems software development
  • Knowledge of the underlying technical foundations of distributed systems
  • Experience with open source streaming technologies, e.g., Kafka and Flink
  • Ability to communicate effectively with both technical and business partners
  • Research mentality with a bias towards action to structure a project from idea to experimentation to prototype to implementation