Software Engineering Intern

About the role

You will own the design and implementation of software components that power our weather modification data ecosystem from ingestion to presentation. The role emphasizes rapid learning through direct interaction with real atmospheric and sensor data streams in operational contexts. You will collaborate closely with cross-functional teams to translate raw telemetry into actionable insights for downstream processing. Expect to take initiative in diagnosing issues, proposing improvements, and iterating on solutions with minimal supervision. You will contribute to a culture of curiosity where questions about data quality and system behavior are encouraged. Your work will directly influence how reliable and timely information supports decision-making in weather modification operations. You will be expected to balance coding tasks with documentation and knowledge sharing to ensure continuity and clarity. This position is ideal for someone who wants to see their code impact real world systems and environmental data platforms.

Key facts

What you'll do

Design and extend Python based data pipelines that handle in-situ, remote, and drone telemetry ingestion at scale.

Implement robust data validation and transformation steps to convert raw sensor streams into consistent internal representations.

Support the development and maintenance of internal APIs, client packages, and operational tooling used by engineers and analysts.

Work with relational and time series data stores to ensure efficient querying and reliable access patterns for weather datasets.

Collaborate with data scientists and domain experts to prototype features that improve the usability of geospatial and atmospheric data.

Instrument services for observability, adding metrics and logs that clarify behavior and simplify troubleshooting in production.

Partner with operations teams to understand deployment constraints and ensure software aligns with reliability and performance goals.

Refactor legacy components to improve maintainability, clarity, and test coverage without disrupting existing workflows.

Explore new data sources and formats, evaluating libraries and protocols that can enhance our ingestion and processing capabilities.

Communicate progress, blockers, and design decisions clearly through written documentation and informal discussions with technical audiences.

Participate in code reviews to share knowledge, surface risks, and uphold quality standards across the engineering team.

Take ownership of small but critical services, ensuring they are monitored, documented, and resilient to failures and edge cases.

Requirements

Be currently enrolled in a degree program as a computer science student or pursuing a related technical field of study.

Demonstrate strong Python fundamentals, including data structures, concurrency models, and ecosystem awareness relevant to data workloads.

Show comfort working with APIs, SQL, and data oriented libraries to query, transform, and analyze information.

Express clear interest in geospatial, atmospheric, or sensor data and how it can be used to drive operational decisions.

Exhibit good debugging skills, using logs, metrics, and traces to isolate issues across distributed components.

Be willing to work across systems, learning about databases, message queues, and deployment environments as needed.

Be willing to relocate to El Segundo, California to support the operational needs of the team.

Pass background checks and comply with employment eligibility verification as required by law.

Nice to have

Experience with cloud platforms, containerization, or infrastructure as code tools that support data pipelines.

Exposure to version control workflows, automated testing, and continuous integration practices.

Basic familiarity with geospatial formats, weather data standards, or scientific data processing concepts.

Knowledge of data visualization approaches that help stakeholders explore observations and derived products.

Practical notes

This is a full time engagement based in El Segundo, California.

Candidates must be able to relocate to El Segundo to be considered for the role.

Participation in E Verify is required for employment, in accordance with company policy.

Rainmaker is an Equal Opportunity Employer; employment with Rainmaker 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. Rainmaker participates in E Verify. To learn more, including your rights and responsibilities, please visit E Verify.gov http://e-verify.gov/.