Customer Engineer Intern
Summary
Customer Engineer Intern at Firebolt troubleshoots and optimizes enterprise data platforms, working on SQL query tuning, migrations, and agentic workflows to ensure customer success, with potential conversion to a full-time role.
Description
About Firebolt
Firebolt is open, real-time datalake infrastructure - the performance of a real-time system with the openness of a datalake. Customers run all their workloads on one platform, on open file formats (Vortex) and open metadata (DuckLake), with zero vendor lock-in. We’re looking for a Customer Engineer intern who wants to work at the intersection of deep technical problem-solving and enterprise customer success.
This is a 3-month internship designed to convert. Perform well and it leads to a full-time Customer Engineer role.
About the role
As a Customer Engineer at Firebolt, you sit at the intersection of technical support and solution architecture. You own the end-to-end success of enterprise customers on the platform. That means you are not just answering tickets, and you are not just designing architectures; you do both, and you own the outcome.
Your work splits into two broad modes you’ll move between constantly, plus a third that builds your and Firebolt’s reputation in the wider community:
- Deep technical work: investigating incidents, debugging performance, tracing logs, and reading execution plans to get to root cause.
- Customer-facing engagement: discovery calls, POCs, migrations, and acting as the trusted technical advisor for your accounts.
- External and community engagement: representing Firebolt to the wider engineering audience through public technical work.
What you’ll work on
- Query optimization: tuning queries, applying indexing and partitioning strategies, and reading execution plans to make real-time workloads fast.
- Migrations & CDC: planning and executing data migration, including CDC pipelines, and helping build drop in migrations from other analytical DB’s
- Agentic workflows: building agentic workflows and tooling that make customer onboarding, diagnostics, and support faster and more repeatable.
- POCs & architecture: owning POCs and technical evaluations end to end, from architecture design through to a working proof on the customer’s data.
Requirements
- Strong SQL and a solid grasp of Analytical database fundamentals: query optimization, indexing, partitioning.
- Familiarity with data migration concepts and CDC pipelines (hands-on experience is a plus, not a requirement).
- Interest in building agentic workflows/automation: you like turning a repetitive technical task into a tool.
- Clear communication. You can explain a tricky technical finding to an engineer on a call and write it up cleanly afterward.
- A customer-first instinct: you want to own the outcome
Nice to have
- Exposure to real-time or embedded analytics, or ML/AI on live data.
- Experience with open table/file formats (Iceberg, Parquet) or lakehouse architectures.
- Any public technical work: blog posts, talks, open-source contributions, benchmarks.
Details
- Duration & location: 3-month internship, fully remote.
- Conversion: Full-time Customer Engineer role for interns who prove a strong fit.
How to apply
Upload your resume and a short note on a technical problem you’re proud of solving to or to LinkedIn.