Internship Optimization Engineer Jobs in Brea, CA

About the company 

General Matter enriches uranium.

We are designing, building, and operating the world's lowest-cost enrichment services, here in the US.  

In the process, we are restoring America's ability to produce nuclear fuel to power AI, advanced manufacturing and critical industries our country relies on to remain competitive. 

Fuel drives the cost of advanced reactor electricity production, and enrichment drives the cost of the fuel that advanced reactors consume.  Reliable, low-cost enrichment is the catalyst for the nuclear Renaissance now under way.

Our mission is to make nuclear not only the cleanest and safest source of baseload power, but also the most affordable.  We believe abundant nuclear energy will lead to a post-scarcity society. 

We were incubated inside Founders Fund, like Anduril and Palantir before us, and are backed by over a dozen of the world's top venture capital firms.  

Our lean, world-class team of engineers and operators is applying a first-principles approach to solving the problem of nuclear fuel production. 

We are a mission-driven company with a culture of urgency, accountability, and transparency. 

Help us build a high-energy society by making the cleanest, safest form of baseload energy the most affordable. 

About This Role

As a General Matter Software Engineering Intern, you will help develop performant, safe, and high-quality software. Your work will support code where reliability, performance, and safety are of utmost importance. You will work closely with cross-functional teams, including electrical engineers, software engineers, chemical engineers, manufacturing engineers, nuclear engineers, materials scientists, and physicists. If you seek high-impact work and are excited by fast-paced, intense, Skunkworks-style projects, we encourage you to reach out to join our team.

We're hiring interns across three focus areas:

• Backend interns will help build high-performance services and APIs that coordinate control systems, manage state across distributed hardware, and expose interfaces for monitoring and operations.
• Distributed systems interns will support the development of fault-tolerant coordination systems, real-time data pipelines processing high-throughput sensor telemetry, and the infrastructure that keeps critical systems running reliably at scale.
• Tooling interns will help build the developer platforms, CI/CD systems, observability tools, and deployment infrastructure that let our team iterate rapidly and safely in a production environment where mistakes have physical consequences.

Responsibilities

• Assist in designing and implementing high-performance software systems in C++ and Python, with a focus on reliability and maintainability.
• Support the architecture of solutions, contributing to decisions around system design, performance trade-offs, and technology selection.
• Participate in technical design reviews and code reviews, learning and helping uphold engineering best practices across the team.
• Help build and maintain automated testing and CI/CD pipelines to support software quality at scale.
• Work closely with senior engineers, contributing to progress on complex, ambiguous technical problems.

Basic Qualifications

• Current undergraduate or graduate student pursuing a degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related discipline.
• Proficiency in C++ and/or Python.
• Strong CS fundamentals, such as algorithms, data structures, concurrency, and system design.
• Collaborative team member who thrives in fast-paced, multidisciplinary environments and is eager to learn.

Preferred Skills and Experience

• Exposure to distributed systems, observability tooling, or infrastructure as code.
• Experience with Python ecosystems for data pipelines, automation, or backend services.
• Coursework or project experience with C++ performance optimization, profiling, or low-level systems programming.
• Familiarity with Linux system programming, including threading models, IPC, or low-level kernel interfaces.
• Evidence of exceptional ability (prior projects, portfolio of work, completed products, etc).

Additional Requirements

• Ability to work extended hours and weekends as necessary.

Equal Opportunity Employer

General Matter is an Equal Opportunity Employer; employment with General Matter is governed on the basis of merit, competence and qualifications and will not be influenced in any manner by race, color, religion, gender, national origin/ethnicity, veteran status, disability status, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, mental or physical disability or any other legally protected status.

Compensation and Benefits

The hourly pay range for this internship is $32-$46 per hour, depending on the candidate's current standing in school (i.e. sophomore, senior).

Interns will receive a monthly housing stipend and are eligible for overtime pay. Please note that the stated hourly range is an estimate and may be adjusted based on market conditions, business needs, or other factors.