Engine Programmer Intern – Unreal Engine Serialization

About the role

Epic Games is looking for an Engine Programmer Intern to join the team building a new serialization stack for Unreal Engine. The schema-based serialization system is central to how engine content is saved, loaded and versioned. Interns are given a feature to own within the development cycle, such as schema evolution, data migration or recovery, type bindings or debug tooling, and work with their engineering lead and partner teams.

Key responsibilities

• Design and implement a feature within the serialization stack, from proposal to shipped code, with guidance from the engineering lead.
• Write high-performance, memory-efficient C++ for systems where correctness and backwards compatibility are critical.
• Build tooling that helps users work with serialized data, such as diffing, visualization and human-readable text formats.
• Develop thorough unit tests to guarantee data integrity across save, load and version-upgrade paths.
• Collaborate with partner teams to integrate the serialization system with their data and workflows.
• Take part in code reviews and design discussions.

Required profile

• Strong C++ fundamentals, including memory management, pointers and templates.
• Good understanding of data structures and how data is laid out in memory.
• Interest in low-level systems programming, such as file formats, binary data, compilers or engine internals.
• Rigorous, detail-oriented approach and comfort debugging unfamiliar code.
• Able to explain a technical design and ask good questions.
• Self-driven, eager to learn and open to feedback.

The internship has a flexible start date in 2027 and recruitment runs until teams find a match. Applicants must be legally authorized to work in the posting location for the duration of the internship.