Development Intern
de Anda Capital · United States
Apply & track with Apply EdgeStart Date: ASAP but open to discussionType: Part-Time
We work directly with founders and operators to source, diligence, acquire, and scale businesses. This role sits at the intersection of all of it.The Farm Program StructureThe purpose of our program is to accelerate careers by eight to ten years. A path that requires eight to ten years of work at a traditional firm is compressed into three to four at de Anda, with the opportunity for fees and equity in two to three years. This engagement is performance-based with a clear path forward.Phase 1 is where MBA candidates will have the opportunity to learn and grow as a junior analyst, a part-time role with compensation.Phase 2 is a transition to a full-time Analyst role upon graduation, with increased scope and defined performance benchmarks.Conversion to full time is offered to strong performers to a full-time paid Analyst role with a clear path to Junior Partner at de Anda Capital or an affiliated platform.The positionThe role sits inside de Anda Labs and builds AI agents that take over the repeatable parts of how the firm works, and, in time, agents that we deliver to clients as products.The intern works alongside two other developer interns, who currently cover web and CRM connectors on one side and workflow automation on the other.This is a build role rather than a research role, and the expectation is working tools shipped on a weekly cadence.Everything built here is used by people who did not write it and who will not read the code, so the written specification and the handover are part of the deliverable rather than an afterthought.Early work is internal, and client-facing work follows once the quality of the internal work has earned it.How the work beginsBefore anything is built, the team runs a first-principles test on a process, and this is the part of the job that a candidate should understand before applying because it governs everything downstream. We take a standard operating procedure that someone at the firm performs, whether that is assembling a diligence checklist, reconciling a rent roll, drafting a first-pass memo, or updating a board, and we break it into the individual judgments and the individual mechanical steps it is actually made of. We then ask, step by step, which of those steps require a person and which of them only appear to.The output of that session is a short list of steps that an agent can own, and only then does the building start. The reason we work this way is specific rather than a matter of preference. Our experience with prior intern cohorts has been that people who build with AI tools can produce working code faster than they can define the problem the code is meant to solve, and development that starts without a clear definition of the problem and the end product produces tools that no one adopts. The first-principles session is how we avoid that, and the Development Intern is expected to participate in it as a full contributor rather than to wait for a specification to arrive.ResponsibilitiesParticipate in first-principles sessions with the team, in which an existing standard operating procedure is decomposed into its individual steps and the steps that an agent can own are identified and agreed on.Write the product requirements document for each agent before building it, covering the problem, the user, the inputs and outputs, the failure modes, and the definition of done. A short and honest document is worth more to us than a long and aspirational one.Build the agent, using Claude Code, Codex, and whichever of the mainstream agent and vibe-coding tools fits the job, and connect it to the systems the firm already runs on, which currently include Excel, Google Workspace, Framer, Pipedream, and the firm’s CRM.Test the agent against real work rather than against invented cases, sitting with the analyst or the associate whose process it is meant to absorb and watching where it breaks.Write the standard operating procedure for the agent once it works, so that someone who has never met the builder can run it, and revise that document when the agent changes.Maintain the task queue in the Dev Build Master spreadsheet, keeping status, scope, and blockers current, because the queue is how Labs reports to the rest of the firm.Hand off finished work, which means a short demonstration to the team that will use the agent and a written record of what it does and does not do. On client engagements the same handover is made to the client, and the documentation has to stand on its own because we will not always be in the room when a question comes up.Required qualificationsWe care considerably more about what a candidate has actually built than about where they are enrolled, but the following are the things we do ask for.Current enrollment at a four-year institution in computer science, software engineering, data science, or a related technical field, or graduation from such a program within roughly the past year.Working coding ability in at least one general-purpose language, with Python or JavaScript being the most immediately useful here, at a level where the candidate can read unfamiliar code and modify it rather than only write their own from scratch.Demonstrated proficiency with Claude Code, Codex, or comparable agentic coding environments, and with the mainstream vibe-coding tools more broadly. We will ask what the candidate has shipped with them and what they learned about where those tools fail.Experience building agents rather than only building applications, meaning tools that take an instruction, plan, call other systems, and return a result, along with some considered view on how to keep such a tool from behaving unpredictably.Experience writing product development standard operating procedures and product requirements documents. We ask for a writing sample on this point, and the sample matters as much as the code sample does.The ability to write clearly in full sentences, because roughly half of what this role produces is prose that other people at the firm have to act on.Preferred qualificationsNone of the following is required, and a candidate should apply without them.Familiarity with workflow automation platforms such as Pipedream, Zapier, or n8n, and with connecting APIs that were not designed to work together.Some exposure to finance, private equity, real estate, or professional services, sufficient to understand why a rent roll or a quality of earnings review is structured the way it is.Front-end work in React, Next.js, or Framer, since a number of the agents we build need an interface that a non-technical person will actually open.Experience running or contributing to evaluations of an AI system, which is to say some discipline around measuring whether a change made the tool better rather than assuming that it did.