Design Engineer Intern 2027 (Yorktown Heights)

About the Role

The Apps@Research team builds the tools that IBM Researchers need to accelerate their work, covering compute, agents, models, data, and support. We are an AI-native team seeking a design engineer intern to collaborate with product managers, engineers, and stakeholders to deliver new experiences from sketch to software.

What You'll Do

• Design and ship UI for production applications, from first sketch to merged code.
• Extend our component library and the Storybook that documents it, so patterns stay reusable and discoverable.
• Prototype in code: put something clickable in front of researchers in days, not weeks, and let what you learn shape 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.

What We're Looking For

• A portfolio of design work showing craft in typography, layout, color, motion, and interaction states, including at least one thing you designed, 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, as does any comparable component workbench.
• Hands-on use of AI coding tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, or v0, going beyond one-off prompting into repeatable setups. We care about loop engineering and agent swarms. A few honest attempts and an opinion about what broke will carry you further than a polished method.
• Enough back-end familiarity to feed a front end, such as Python, Go, or Node.js. You can read an API response and shape the data an interface needs.
• 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, such as brand, editorial, or client work where the tone was not your own.
• Accessibility fundamentals: keyboard navigation, contrast, semantic markup, and 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.