Spring Internship

The Design Rules CompanyNew York City, New YorkOn-siteInternshipListed 3 days ago

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About this role

Build creative systems and partnerships for a city focused design brand.

About Us

We are a product design company with a small team, focused on transit systems and cities. Our flagship product, Metroboard, is a walnut and aluminum art piece that shows live train movement through the city.

We are especially rooted in New York, where most of our community and customers are, but the work is about cities broadly. We focus on form through function and the curiosity, recognition, and wonder of seeing something familiar reframed.

We are in an early scaling phase with strong traction in New York and growing presence in other major cities, looking to build durable cultural and commercial systems around the brand, partnerships, and community.

Role overview

This is a multidisciplinary engineering internship spanning electrical, software, firmware, and mechanical design.

You will help turn product ideas into working objects, moving between disciplines as the work requires. You might design a circuit, write firmware, build a software tool, or work through how an assembly fits together. The product is the focus, rather than any one engineering discipline.

This role is ideal for someone who likes making things and wants to build range quickly. You do not need to arrive knowing everything, but you should be willing to learn whatever a product needs and take ownership of understanding how the whole thing works.

This is a self-directed, high-ownership internship. You will help define the questions, figure out what you need to learn, and move projects forward without waiting for every step to be laid out. You will work closely with the engineering team to

What you will do

- You will explore product ideas through research, experiments, and working prototypes.
- You will work across electronics, firmware, software, and mechanical design, following the needs of the product rather than staying inside a fixed discipline.
- You will design and test circuits, write code, and develop physical parts and assemblies.
- You will connect the pieces into complete prototypes and work through how they behave together.
- You will investigate unfamiliar tools, materials, and technical approaches, building the knowledge needed to make decisions and keep moving.
- You will test and debug your work, identify what is not working, and improve it through iteration.
- You will document what you learn so that decisions, experiments, and technical knowledge are useful beyond a single prototype.
- You will contribute to the product design of upcoming products, balancing function, form, and how something is made.

What we are looking for

- Strong curiosity across engineering disciplines and a desire to understand how things work.
- Experience making things, whether through personal projects, coursework, or other hands-on work.
- Comfort moving between code, electronics, and physical design, even when some of those areas are new to you.
- Ability to work independently, ask good questions, and create structure without needing every step defined.
- Strong initiative and willingness to take ownership of a problem from the first question through testing.
- Sensitivity to how technical decisions affect the form and experience of a product.
- Interest in objects, cities, infrastructure, and physical design.
- Ability to move quickly, experiment, and learn from things that do not work.

Application instructions

No need for a formal cover letter! Instead, please include:

- A portfolio or examples of things you have built (code, circuits, CAD, prototypes, anything relevant)
- A short note on a project you took ownership of, what you had to learn, and how you worked through it.

Please do not submit AI-generated cover letters, portfolios, or answers. All applications are read by real people, and we want to hear from real applicants.