About Yugabyte
Yugabyte is the company behind YugabyteDB, the leading open-source distributed SQL database for building mission-critical, cloud-native applications. Many Fortune 100 companies trust YugabyteDB to power applications that demand global scale, high availability, and uncompromising consistency.

At Yugabyte, you’ll work alongside world-class engineers who built databases and distributed systems at companies like Facebook, Nutanix, Oracle, Google, Microsoft, and VMware. Our engineering team is deeply involved in the open-source community and is advancing the state of the art in distributed databases, PostgreSQL compatibility, and cloud services.

Why Yugabyte is exciting for Waterloo students

• You’ll get to work on hard systems problems: distributed consensus, query planning & optimization, compactions, replication, connection management, and global deployments.
• Exposure to open-source at scale: your contributions can land directly in one of the fastest-growing distributed SQL projects on GitHub.
• Learn what it takes to run a database in the cloud era: high availability across zones & regions, automated failover, observability, and performance tuning on AWS, Azure, and GCP.
• Impact: your work will power real-world use cases like online banking, global e-commerce, and even streaming the Super Bowl without a glitch.
• Culture: small, collaborative engineering teams where mentorship is built-in and ideas matter more than titles.

What you’ll work on
Depending on your team and interest, projects may include:

• Enhancing PostgreSQL compatibility (query planner, new SQL features).
• Advancing vector indexing techniques for semantic search and AI workloads.
• Improving fault tolerance, replication, and distributed consensus in Yugabyte’s DocDB engine.
• Performance engineering at scale (query retries, cost-based optimizations, smart connection pooling).
• Leveraging AI-based performance tuning to optimize queries and automate system reliability at scale.
• Building tooling for observability, debugging, and automation in distributed clusters.

Role

As a software engineering intern working on the Core Database, you will be responsible for designing and implementing features in the heart of the database. This is logically split into two high level components, DocDB and YQL. The storage engine of Yugabyte (DocDB) is responsible for efficient data storage and retrieval, our raft consensus and distributed transaction layers, as well as overall stability and reliability of the database. On top of this layer, sits the query and language layer (YQL), which is responsible for efficient query handling, database security and visibility, as well as making the breadth of SQL functionality available to our users.

We are looking for students who are highly collaborative, driven and thrive in a fast-paced startup environment, and who are excited about building an internet-scale, globally distributed, SQL database.

Minimum qualifications:

• Currently pursuing a BS or MS in Computer Science or related field.
• Experience with CS fundamentals, algorithms and data structures and software design.
• Experience in Software Development and coding in a general purpose programming language.

Preferred qualifications:

• Working knowledge of C or C++.
• Experience with distributed systems, operating systems, networking, compilers, database design or SQL.
• Experience with concurrency, multithreading and synchronization.

About the job

• Focus on a specific project critical to Yugabyte’s needs from design and implementation, all the way to shipping it to production.

• Collaborate with your team members to come up with creative solutions to challenging problems.
• Grow through mentorship and coaching to drive impact and polish your engineering expertise.
• Enjoy access to regular knowledge sharing sessions, including design reviews, hands on workshops, technical training etc.
• Present your work and results at the end of your internship, to the broader organization, including executive leadership.