What are the responsibilities and job description for the Engineering Intern - HRIS Product position at Workstream?
Workstream is a mission-driven company building the all-in-one HR, payroll, and hiring platform for managing the hourly workforce. There are 2.7 billion hourly workers, making up 80% of the global workforce, but this market has been heavily underserved by technology and deserves better. Workstream has been purpose-built for the hourly workforce from day one so that these businesses and their employees can thrive.
Our customers include leading brands from multiple sectors, including Burger King, Carl's Jr./Hardee's, IHOP, KFC, and Culvers. We are a high growth series B company and quickly expanding our product portfolio to deliver on our vision. We are backed by legendary VCs and industry experts like Founders Fund, BOND, and Coatue.
Grow With Us
We are hiring Full-Stack Engineering Interns to join our HRIS Product team in San Francisco for the 2026 or 2027 cohort. This is a hands-on, high-impact role where you’ll ship real features to production, work closely with senior engineers, and go deep on AI.
The defining focus of this cohort is agent development—you’ll build, evaluate, and iterate on AI agents using modern Agent Development Kits (ADKs) to automate complex HRIS workflows and unlock new product capabilities.
We’re looking for engineers who are comfortable across the full stack—from building React interfaces that surface AI-powered insights, to developing backend services in Rails or Go, to designing and deploying intelligent agents. This role is best suited for candidates who want to go deep across both the product and intelligence layers; pure front-end specialization will not be the right fit.
This is a full-time internship role with a duration of 6–12 months, operating on a rolling intake beginning in Q3 2026 or Q1 2027. The role reports directly to the Engineering Manager and follows a hybrid setup based in our San Francisco office, requiring three days per week onsite.
Day in the Life
You will be embedded in our HRIS product engineering team. Depending on your track, your work may include:
AI & Agent Development
Getting familiar with any of these before you join will give you a head start:
This is not a ticket-grinding internship. You will have weekly 1:1s with your engineering lead, attend team planning sessions, and present your work to senior leadership. Strong interns are considered for full-time roles. We move fast, so the ceiling on your impact is set by you, not by your title.
What We Offer
Workstream provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation and training.
We are committed to the full inclusion of all qualified individuals.
Our customers include leading brands from multiple sectors, including Burger King, Carl's Jr./Hardee's, IHOP, KFC, and Culvers. We are a high growth series B company and quickly expanding our product portfolio to deliver on our vision. We are backed by legendary VCs and industry experts like Founders Fund, BOND, and Coatue.
Grow With Us
We are hiring Full-Stack Engineering Interns to join our HRIS Product team in San Francisco for the 2026 or 2027 cohort. This is a hands-on, high-impact role where you’ll ship real features to production, work closely with senior engineers, and go deep on AI.
The defining focus of this cohort is agent development—you’ll build, evaluate, and iterate on AI agents using modern Agent Development Kits (ADKs) to automate complex HRIS workflows and unlock new product capabilities.
We’re looking for engineers who are comfortable across the full stack—from building React interfaces that surface AI-powered insights, to developing backend services in Rails or Go, to designing and deploying intelligent agents. This role is best suited for candidates who want to go deep across both the product and intelligence layers; pure front-end specialization will not be the right fit.
This is a full-time internship role with a duration of 6–12 months, operating on a rolling intake beginning in Q3 2026 or Q1 2027. The role reports directly to the Engineering Manager and follows a hybrid setup based in our San Francisco office, requiring three days per week onsite.
Day in the Life
You will be embedded in our HRIS product engineering team. Depending on your track, your work may include:
AI & Agent Development
- Design and build AI agents that automate complex HRIS workflows — from candidate screening to onboarding task orchestration
- Integrate large language models (LLMs) into our product surface for intelligent document parsing, conversational interfaces, and proactive recommendations
- Evaluate and iterate on agent performance: prompt engineering, tool use, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and evaluation pipelines
- Experiment with emerging AI frameworks and contribute your findings back to the team
- Build and ship product features end-to-end across our Ruby on Rails backend, React frontend, and Go microservices
- Design and optimise APIs that power our mobile and web HRIS clients
- Collaborate with product and design to translate user needs into robust, scalable engineering solutions
- Write clean, tested, well-reviewed code and participate actively in engineering rituals (standups, PR reviews, retros)
- Proficiency in JavaScript / TypeScript and React for building product UIs
- Solid backend skills in Ruby on Rails and/or Go — able to own API design and data modelling end-to-end
- Hands-on experience or strong working knowledge of Agent Development Kits (ADKs) such as Google ADK, LangGraph, CrewAI, or similar frameworks
- Familiarity with LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, etc.) — tool use, streaming, function calling, and prompt engineering
- Solid programming fundamentals: data structures, algorithms, system design thinking
- Strong written and verbal communication — we are async-first and clarity of thought matters
- Experience with RAG pipelines, vector databases (Pinecone, pgvector), or embedding workflows
- Exposure to AWS or other cloud infrastructure and DevOps practices
- Background in ML / deep learning
- Experience building multi-agent systems or agentic workflows in a production setting
- You are pursuing (or have recently completed) a degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field
- You write code you are proud of — readable, testable, and considerate of the next person who reads it
- You are genuinely curious about AI and excited about working on systems that affect real people's livelihoods
- You thrive in ambiguity, pick up context fast, and ask sharp questions
- You communicate clearly in writing and in meetings — async-first culture means words matter
- You have a low ego and a high standard — you want your work to be excellent, not to look excellent
- You want startup velocity: shipping beats perfecting, learning beats knowing
Getting familiar with any of these before you join will give you a head start:
- Backend: Ruby on Rails, Go
- Frontend: React, TypeScript
- AI / ML: OpenAI / Anthropic APIs, LangChain / LangGraph, vector databases (Pinecone, pgvector)
- Infrastructure: AWS, PostgreSQL, Redis, Sidekiq
- Tooling: GitHub, Linear, Notion, Figma
This is not a ticket-grinding internship. You will have weekly 1:1s with your engineering lead, attend team planning sessions, and present your work to senior leadership. Strong interns are considered for full-time roles. We move fast, so the ceiling on your impact is set by you, not by your title.
What We Offer
- Competitive internship compensation
- Direct access to founders, engineering leadership, and a world-class investor network
- Real ownership: your code ships to production and impacts thousands of users
- Hybrid working arrangement — 3 days in our San Francisco office, with flexibility on the remaining days
- A globally distributed team that deeply cares about craft, people, and each other
- A clear path to a full-time offer for exceptional interns
- https://www.workstream.us/blog/funding-series-b
- https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/26/workstreams-text-based-recruitment-tool-gets-a-48m-bet-from-bond-and-beyond/
- https://techbuzz.news/buzzworthy-august-27-2021/
Workstream provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation and training.
We are committed to the full inclusion of all qualified individuals.