Design Engineer Intern 2027 - Design and Build AI-Native Interfaces

Introduction The Apps@Research team builds the tools that IBM Researchers need to accelerate their work. Whether it’s compute, agents, models, data or support; we work closely with our research teams to build what they need. We are an AI-native team and looking for a design engineer intern who can collaborate with product managers, engineers, and stakeholders to deliver new experiences from sketch to software.

Your Role And Responsibilities

• Design and ship UI work for production applications, from first sketch to merged code.
• Extend our component library and the Storybook that documents it, so patterns stay reusable and other people can find them.
• Prototype in code. Put something clickable in front of researchers in days, not weeks, and let what you learn change the design.
• Work alongside AI coding agents as a normal part of the job, and improve how the team runs them.
• Carry IBM Research’s voice into the interface — its tone, restraint, and vocabulary — while bringing your own aesthetic judgment to the work.

Preferred Education Bachelor’s Degree

Required Technical And Professional Expertise

• A portfolio of design work. Show craft: typography, layout, color, motion, interaction states. Include at least one thing you designed and built and put in front of real users. Live links beat static files.
• Working knowledge of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and component frameworks. You can take a design from Figma to a working component without waiting for someone else.
• Exposure to design systems in practice. Component variants, design tokens, and writing a component’s documentation so a stranger uses it correctly. Building or running a Storybook counts; so does any comparable component workbench.
• Hands-on use of AI coding tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, or v0 past one-off prompting and into repeatable setups. Two specific practices we care about: loop engineering (designing a process that keeps an agent working toward a stated goal and checks its own output, rather than typing every prompt yourself) and agent swarms (splitting a job across several agents running in parallel, each with a narrow scope). These practices are new and still changing. A few honest attempts and an opinion about what broke will carry you further here than a polished method.
• Enough back-end familiarity to feed a front end — Python, Go, or Node.js. You can read an API response and shape the data an interface needs.

Preferred Technical And Professional Experience

• A point of view about software, and the language to explain why an interface works or fails.
• Evidence you can write in someone else’s voice: brand, editorial, or client work where the tone was not your own.
• Accessibility fundamentals: keyboard navigation, contrast, semantic markup, basic screen reader testing.
• Git, pull requests, and code review.
• Cloud development exposure: containers, Kubernetes or OpenShift.
• Agile development practices.
• Interface writing: empty states, error messages, release notes.