3D Design Tools Intern, Prototyping
Prototyping is an exploratory design team. We design software to explore what new hardware might bring to our current and future products. Over the past decade we have incubated products like iPad and Pencil, and were instrumental in the design and development of the TrueDepth camera for iPhone X, Face ID, LiDAR for iPad Pro, and depth photography. We express our ideas through pictures, animation, video and code. The work we do is on a 3–5-year timescale — if it makes it into a product at all.
We are hiring an intern to help design and implement 3D prototyping tools alongside the designers and engineers on our team.
Here are some of the things we are looking for. Naturally, we do not expect prospective candidates to match all of the criteria below; we value breadth as much as we value depth for these areas.
Programming
As a programmer, you go beyond any single programming language or framework. You have worked with languages with manual memory management, scripting languages, and everything in between. You are eager to write code that jumps between domain areas, from networking to interfacing with hardware to physics engines.
Interest or experience in any of the following is a strong plus:
- Building interactive systems (games, simulations, creative tools, etc.)
- Apple technologies (Swift, Objective C, UIKit, Metal, etc.)
- Graphics programming (WebGL, shaders, linear algebra, etc.)
Prototyping
You can quickly put a proof of concept together, valuing rapidity of execution over performance; you are not attached to your code, and are not afraid to discard things and rewrite them more optimally later if needed.
As a prototyping team, we seek to answer questions by quickly iterating over answers despite ever present ambiguity. This has to sound exciting to you!
Designing
While not necessarily a designer yourself, you understand the value of good design and cultivate curiosity about it. You have experience with, or are excited about, working with designers. You probably have thoughts about what the interface of your favorite software does well, and how it could be improved.
Familiarity with existing 3D design and prototyping tools (Cinema4D, Unity, etc.) is a bonus.
Collaborating
Our team works with teams and individuals across Apple, from hardware engineers to executives. You enjoy conveying the essence of deeply technical information to non technical people, and you can deliver clear presentations that get to the core of benchmarks, hardware comparisons, algorithmic limitations, and so on.
You are not afraid to quickly pick up entirely new skills or learn new concepts when needed, for example by reading papers, source code, watching talks, or just talking to people.
Above all, we value curiosity, openness, and a constant desire to learn and do better.
Education We are looking for undergraduate or graduate students graduating on or after May 2022. Please apply here by January 31, 2021.
How do I apply?
What is the interview process?
- Please submit your portfolio in the application link. Even if you do not feel like you meet all the criteria, we would be happy to hear from you. We like looking at portfolios and we like unconventional people.
If you do not have a portfolio, please put together a brief PDF document featuring 2-4 of your favorite projects from the past year or two. For each project, include a few images from the final implementation, and a few paragraphs describing what the problem you set out to solve was, what approaches you took to come up with a solution, and how you implemented the solution. If you worked on it with others, please describe what you did.
- If we are interested, we will schedule phone calls with you to talk about your work, learn about you, and answer any questions you have about the team or Apple.
- After the calls, if we are mutually excited at the prospect of working together this summer, we will give you a brief design exercise to work on. At this stage your submission will be anonymized for review by our team.
- After that, we will make a decision as a team. If you do not join the team, we probably thought you were special and promising, and we will probably say hi in the future to see what you are up to.
We are committed to hiring a diverse team with people from different backgrounds, with different points of view, and with different levels of experience.