Forward Deployed Engineer Intern

THE ROLE

Opptra is an AI-first company helping international brands expand into Asia — across India, GCC, and SEA — through franchising, licensing, and inventory-led partnerships. We move fast, build with intent, and run lean.

You'll embed directly with our Forward Deployed Engineers — the team that sits at the intersection of business problems and AI infrastructure. FDEs don't take tickets. They own a business outcome, figure out the system to solve it, and build it. As an intern, you'll work alongside an FDE on a live workstream (catalogue automation, O2C processing, performance marketing, or pricing) and go from discovery to shipped code. If you do well, we want to keep you.

WHAT YOU'LL DO: IN 1 Year

• Work on a real agentic workstream — not a sandbox project. Your code will run in production.
• Help design and build LLM-powered workflows: prompt engineering, tool use, output structuring, eval loops.
• Write Python scripts and pipelines that connect APIs, process marketplace data, and trigger business actions.
• Build lightweight internal tools — dashboards, alert systems, data quality checkers — that ops teams actually use.
• Debug, iterate, and improve existing automation from first principles, not just patch symptoms.
• Document what you build clearly enough that someone else can extend it without you.

WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR.

• Strong Python fundamentals. You can write clean, working code without leaning on a framework to think for you
• Genuine curiosity about how LLMs work — not just how to call the API, but when to use them and when not to
• Problem-first instinct: you read a messy business situation and ask what's the real constraint before opening your editor
• Comfort with ambiguity. We won't hand you a detailed spec. You'll need to ask the right questions and scope the work yourself
• Some hands-on experience with AI tooling — Claude API, OpenAI, LangChain, or similar. Personal projects count
• Basic familiarity with SQL or data querying. A plus if you've touched BigQuery or any cloud data warehouse.

APPLY

• IF You've built something with an LLM that actually does something useful — even if small
• You've used Cursor, Claude Code, or similar AI-assisted dev tools as part of your actual workflow
• You've shipped something to a real user, even in a side project or college contex
• You can explain a technical decision in plain language to a non-technical stakeholder.

DO NOT APPLY IF

• You've only used LLMs via a UI and haven't written code against an API.
• You reach for a framework before you understand the problem.
• You need detailed requirements to start, and ask for more specs when things get unclear instead of making a call.

WHAT YOU'LL GET

• Direct access to FDEs and the Head of Engineering — not an internship manager buffer
• Real ownership on a production workstream from day one
• Exposure to agentic system design, marketplace data infrastructure, and eCommerce operations at scale.
• Competitive internship stipend.

At Opptra, we write down what we believe and hold each other to it. If this sounds like the work you've been waiting to do — we want to hear from you.