Prose - Software engineer - 6 month internship

Our Mission

Prose is truly custom hair and skin care made-to-order—just for you. Our line of custom products are made by an in-house, Paris-based R&D team of gifted chemists who combine natural ingredients in innovative ways alongside dermatologists, giving consumers clean skin care, hair care and impeccable results.

At the heart of Prose’s success is Singular, its proprietary AI-powered beauty-tech platform, which has revolutionized personalized beauty at scale. Marrying a technology-driven approach with an apothecary-style concept, all Prose hair and skin care products are personalized to your one-of-a-kind hair, skin, goals and environment.

We’re a company that wants to change beauty practices, so we’re changing the way beauty companies practice. As a certified B Corporation, a Public Benefit Corporation and Climate Neutral, we’re proving that good business is always sustainable. With Prose, there’s nothing sacrificed to bring you great products—not trees, materials, wages, or performance.

Prose & Singular in Numbers

• Founded in 2017, with hubs in Paris, New York, and Los Angeles

• 10M+ consultations completed

• 2M customers and 350K active subscribers

• 21M custom products made, with 1M+ unique formulas

• 350+ team members across disciplines

• $600M+ in lifetime sales, with $165M+ revenue in 2024

• Profitable since 2024 

Position Summary

At Prose, we create custom formulations tailored to each customer's unique needs. The Algo team plays a central role in this mission: we build and maintain the API that serves the models powering our main platform, enabling accurate product recommendations and personalized formulations. We also develop internal tools that support our R&D team in their search for the best formulation algorithms.

As a Software Engineer Intern on the Algo Team, you will contribute to improving the performance, reliability, and maintainability of the services behind our personalization engine. You will help optimize the latency and resource usage of our API endpoints, build tools that streamline R&D workflows, and ensure our model-serving infrastructure remains robust as we continue to innovate.

This role offers hands-on experience in backend engineering within a dynamic environment, where your contributions will have a visible impact on both internal teams and customer-facing features. 

Key ResponsibilitiesAPI & Service Maintenance

• Maintain and enhance the API that serves our personalization and formulation models.

• Ensure high reliability, stability, and performance of our backend services.

• Collaborate with ML engineers to integrate new algorithmic features into production.

Internal Tools for R&D

• Develop and maintain Python tools that support the R&D team in exploring and validating new formulation algorithms.

• Automate recurring tasks and improve workflows 

• Document tools to ensure ease of use and maintainability.

Performance & Optimization

• Contribute to load testing, monitoring, and observability improvements.

Engineering Best Practices

• Write clean, readable, maintainable Python code.

• Contribute to a well-tested codebase with unit tests, integration tests, and functional tests.

• Participate in peer reviews, continuous integration, and collaborative team discussions.