Hardware Intern
meter · San Francisco · onsite
USD 25 to 40 a year
Meter builds networking hardware that businesses depend on to stay connected. Building great hardware requires more than designing circuits and shipping products, it means thinking deeply about performance, reliability, manufacturability, supply chain, installation, sustainability, and how our products operate throughout their entire lifecycle.
We are hiring Hardware Engineering Interns to explore and solve technical problems across Meter’s hardware engineering and operations teams. During the 12-week internship, you will own a well-scoped project based on your interests, experience, and the problems that matter most to Meter.
Depending on your interests and background, you could tackle:
- Next-generation power adapters: Evaluate and prototype compact, efficient power supplies for future Meter compact products such as Pets. This is an engineering-focused project including architecture selection, component evaluation, thermal performance, efficiency, reliability, product design, and cost. Ultimately, your work could help the company accomplish prototypes that will directly translate to a shippable product.
- Hardware lifecycle and sustainability: Explore how Meter products can be reused, refurbished, donated, disassembled, or recycled at end of life, including the technical and economic feasibility of extending their useful life.
- Installer hardware and tooling: Design and prototype custom hardware, tools, fixtures, or diagnostic devices that make Meter networks easier and faster to install, service, and troubleshoot in the field.
- Acoustics and thermal systems: Develop and characterize custom fan or cooling solutions for future high-performance networking and data center products, optimizing airflow, acoustics, reliability, power consumption, and mechanical constraints.
- Supply chain intelligence: Analyze Meter’s component and supply-chain data to identify material risks, long-lead components, concentration risks, and potential bottlenecks before they affect hardware builds. This is a data analysis focused project.
This is a hands-on engineering role with real-world outcomes. You will work alongside Meter engineers, operators, suppliers, and manufacturing partners to understand a problem, evaluate potential solutions, build and test where appropriate, analyze the results, and recommend a path forward.
What success looks likeYou will take ownership of a meaningful hardware problem and move it from an open question to an evidence-backed recommendation. Success could mean building and validating a working prototype, characterizing the performance of a new technology, identifying and qualifying a supplier, developing a tool that improves how we install or manufacture hardware, uncovering supply chain risks through data, or creating a process that Meter can put into practice.
You will leave behind something the Hardware team can use: data, prototypes, test results, engineering requirements, supplier evaluations, tools, or technical recommendations that help us build better products.
By the end of the internship, you should be able to explain what you investigated, how you tested your assumptions, what you learned, the engineering tradeoffs involved, and what Meter should do next.
Your day-to-day will depend on the project you choose, but you may:
- Design, build, and test electrical or mechanical prototypes for future Meter products
- Evaluate components, technologies, architectures, materials, and suppliers
- Develop test plans and characterize performance, reliability, thermals, acoustics, power, or other system-level behavior
- Work directly with networking hardware, PCBAs, mechanical assemblies, test equipment, and manufacturing samples
- Analyze manufacturing, component, or supply chain data to identify trends, risks, and opportunities
- Work with overseas suppliers and manufacturing partners to understand technical capabilities, constraints, cost, and scalability
- Explore sustainability, repairability, refurbishment, component reuse, recycling, and other hardware lifecycle opportunities
- Work cross-functionally with hardware engineering, supply chain, operations, software, product, finance, and other teams
- Present your findings and recommendations to the Hardware team at the end of the internship
Who you areWe are searching for people who are curious, hands-on, and excited to learn by building. You are a good fit if:
- You are pursuing a degree in electrical engineering, computer engineering, mechanical engineering, manufacturing engineering, industrial engineering, supply chain, or another related technical field
- You enjoy taking ambiguous technical problems and breaking them into questions you can answer through engineering and experimentation
- You have experience building, testing, debugging, or taking apart hardware, or are eager to learn
- You are comfortable getting hands-on with physical systems, whether that means PCBAs, mechanical assemblies, test equipment, prototypes, manufacturing data, or supplier samples
- You can use data to make engineering decisions rather than relying solely on intuition
- You are comfortable learning things you have never encountered before and asking questions when you don’t understand something
- You can communicate technical findings clearly and turn your work into recommendations that others can act on
Experience with networking hardware, electronics, embedded systems, PCB design, CAD, manufacturing, thermal design, acoustics, data analysis, supply chain, or hardware lifecycle engineering is a plus, but none is required individually.
More than anything, we’re looking for people who want to understand how great hardware gets built.
Why Meter?Meter is a vertically integrated networking company. Hardware, software, services, ISP, and autonomous networks—all built on a single data pipeline from the local network to the data center.
The internet runs the world. Every purchase you make, video call you join, it's all packets flowing through networks. But those networks haven’t changed for decades. They’re brittle, complex, and surprisingly hard to set up in an enterprise space.
We started Meter to build better networks. We had to build everything from the ground-up: designing and building our own enterprise hardware, intuitive software, and streamlined operations to deliver great outcomes for our customers. Today, we build and deploy these networks at scale. Ambitious companies and enduring institutions like Bridgewater, Lyft, Reddit, rely on Meter to keep their thousands of employees and locations online and productive.
Our bet with Meter is simple: we will all use the internet more than we do today. We believe we have the definitive networking stack in place to enable business to do so as seamlessly and reliably as any modern utility.
Compensation- The estimated hourly rate for this role is $25-40/hr.
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