Hardware Engineering Internship

Overview

Join Microsoft's University Intern program and build community while exploring your passions. As a Hardware Engineering intern, you will focus on end-to-end hardware quality engineering for large-scale AI and GPU-based data center fleets, with an emphasis on early failure detection, root cause analysis, and operational quality enablement. You will partner with data center operations, firmware, platform engineering, diagnostics, and vendor teams to improve hardware reliability, reduce repeat incidents, and accelerate mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR) across production AI infrastructure.

You will develop, modify, and evaluate components used in electronic devices that involve mechanical systems and equipment, and/or the manipulation and transmission of electricity. This role involves defining design approaches, technical specifications, and parameters for devices. You will ensure designs and specifications document test requirements that account for customer use scenarios, help select materials and components based on analysis of specifications and reliability, and may work with suppliers to select optimal materials. You will also help develop test plans and test cases.

Interns work on real-world projects in collaboration with teams across the world, while having fun along the way. You'll be empowered to build community, explore your passions, and achieve your goals. This is your chance to bring your solutions and ideas to life while working on cutting-edge technology.

Academic credit may be available through the Microsoft Intern Program; university-specific requirements beyond academic credit are not supported. This internship begins 1 Feb 2027 and spans six months.

Responsibilities

• Assist in creating robust, scalable, secure, and extensible designs or verification plans for hardware engineering aspects of well-defined products or features.
• Conduct automated testing on standard products, participate in testing dashboard creation, identify common feature flaws using data analysis, and help build prototypes to validate features.
• Follow a project schedule to deliver hardware engineering aspects of a feature or product, choose appropriate parts, and evaluate essential details of materials used in production.
• Document essential details about materials, components, and assemblies for a device via accepted release processes. Accurately record and track design changes following established processes with guidance from other engineers.
• Innovate ways to communicate and visualize user experiences and analyze hardware and firmware designs.
• Leverage debugging skills and drive to develop innovative hardware.
• Perform single-node and rack-level testing to confirm hardware remediation effectiveness before fleet re-entry.
• Analyze large volumes of hardware telemetry, logs, and diagnostics data to identify systemic failure patterns and repeat offenders.
• Partner with diagnostics and platform teams to enable out-of-band telemetry collection (e.g., BMC SEL, PCIe health indicators) and integrate diagnostics into existing operational tools and workflows.

Qualifications

Required qualifications:

• Currently pursuing a Bachelor's Degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or related field, or equivalent experience.
• Must have at least one additional quarter/semester of school remaining following the completion of the internship.

Additional or Preferred qualifications:

• Currently pursuing a Bachelor's Degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, or related field.
• Experience with server architectures and/or their subsystems, including GPU, CPU, AI hardware, Memory, and methods for root cause analysis and debugging.

The base pay range for this internship is USD $5,690.00 - $11,210.00 per month. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $7,410.00 - $12,250.00 per month.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information at the provided link.

Microsoft accepts applications and processes offers for these roles on an ongoing basis throughout the academic calendar (September - April). This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.