Forward Deployed Engineer Intern (Full-Stack + AI)

Compensation: No equity

Unpaid internship · 3 months · 5–10 hrs/week · Remote (US) · Academic credit available

Zapp Studios AI Agent Lab — Fall 2026 Cohort

Zapp Studios builds growth marketing and software as one system for small businesses — restaurants, mobile pet care, e-commerce, home services. Real clients, real revenue, one small AI-native team.

The AI Agent Lab is a 3-month, part-time program where you learn to build with Claude — Claude Code, the Anthropic API, MCP servers, agent evals — and then point those skills at an actual business problem for an actual client. You finish with agents you shipped, a portfolio you can show, and working command of tooling most people are still just reading threads about.

This is unpaid, and we'll be straight with you about it. What you get is the training, real client work, the portfolio, and a written reference from someone who watched you build. If your school gives credit for an internship, we'll do the paperwork.

How the three months run:

• Weeks 1–3 — Learn. Guided ramp on Claude Code, context and prompt design, tool use, MCP, and evals. Structured, with checkpoints.
• Weeks 4–8 — Build. You take a scoped, real problem from a Zapp client or product and build the thing that solves it.
• Weeks 9–12 — Ship. Deploy it, measure it, demo it. It goes in your portfolio.

In this track you'll:

• Sit close to one real business owner and build what their problem actually needs — the booking flow, the internal dashboard, the ordering page, the thing that replaces their spreadsheet
• Ship full-stack: Next.js, TypeScript, Tailwind, Supabase, deployed on Vercel
• Use Claude Code as your daily driver and find out first-hand what it's genuinely good and bad at
• Demo your work to the owner, take the feedback, ship again

You probably:

• Are comfortable with TypeScript/React and can pick up a new stack fast
• Have shipped something real — a side project, a hackathon, freelance work. We care more about what you've built than your GPA
• Have high agency and thrive in ambiguity
• Care about the business result, not just the code

Nice to have: Supabase/Postgres, Next.js App Router, Stripe, or having run your own thing.

Everyone in the Lab gets: weekly working sessions with the founder, one real shipped project, and a written reference. A Claude subscription is not included: from Week 2 you'll need your own, the $20 plan to start, and be prepared to upgrade later in the program.

5–10 hours a week, remote, async-friendly, on your own schedule. Cohort runs Sep 14 – Dec 11, 2026. Applications close Sep 7.

To apply: in your application note, do two things — (1) link the single most impressive thing you've built, grown, designed, or sold, with one paragraph on what it does and what was hard about it; (2) confirm that unpaid, 5–10 hrs/week, Sep 14 – Dec 11 works for your schedule. Applications without a link get read last.