R&D Data Engineering Intern

Inca Digital

Inca Digital

R&D Data Engineering Intern

Inca DigitalRemote (United States)Full-time

Company Info

Inca Digital is a Digital Asset Data and Intelligence Company started in 2018. Inca serves clients across national security, intelligence, leading crypto exchanges, large financial institutions, regulators, and law enforcement. Public examples of some of our work include:

  • https://inca.digital/news/ 

  • CFTC Selects Inca Digital Federal as Winner of Agency’s First Science Prize Competition

  • U.S. Crypto Traders Evade Offshore Exchange Bans - WSJ

Inca operates as a fast paced, nimble, global, and remote technology company. We leverage an asynchronous-first workflow, try to minimize time spent on meetings, and rely heavily on detailed documentation, atomic iterations, and open-debate. We don’t track hours, or care where you work from, as long as timelines are being met and work is being delivered! Our team is composed of some of the smartest people from all over the world with diverse industry backgrounds (such as intelligence, traditional finance, data engineering, IT security, math, biology/chemistry, and investigative journalism)

Internship Description

We are seeking a capable CSE student to join our R&D team for the summer 2026 term. We require someone who won’t outsource their thought to LLMs, is able to think on their feet and identify actionable insights when ingesting data from numerous sources. To be clear, we value engineers who use tools to accelerate workflows but possess the fundamental knowledge to audit, debug, and validate every line of code generated. R&D is a small and highly collaborative team of engineers and scientists. You will be expected to offer your unique perspective, suggest solutions and propose changes. The work we do on the R&D team requires attention to detail and the ability to learn new skills on the fly. We consume, process, and store various large sources of data in efforts to productize solutions for both our clients and our analysts ( APIs, Dashboards, and Alerts). In doing so, R&D is extremely cross functional and interacts with Inca’s various other teams: Business, Sales, AACE, Investigations, etc. as we work to deliver actionable insights to our clients.

What You Will Be Doing:

  • Report to an R&D Data Engineer for task prioritization, development timelines, code reviews, technical guidance, and ongoing mentorship.

  • Contribute to the development and maintenance of existing services and support team members with ad hoc engineering tasks.

  • Proactively research, document, and present technical questions and proposed solutions to the R&D team.

Specialized Tracks: We are seeking interns for three distinct tracks.

Track 1: Data Engineering

  • Develop and optimize data ingestion and transformation pipelines

  • Integrate and extract insights from external data sources

  • Build robust local tooling with comprehensive error handling and test coverage

Track 2: Blockchain OSINT

  • Collect and curate open-source blockchain intelligence

  • Perform data normalization and entity resolution across on-chain and off-chain sources

  • Conduct blockchain forensics and flow-of-funds analysis

Track 3: Natural Language Data Processing

  • Support NLP model training, fine-tuning, and evaluation

  • Perform quality control and assurance on labeled datasets and model outputs

  • Identify and validate source materials for training data

Types of Skills & Experience We Are Looking For:

  • Proficiency in Python, Go, and SQL

  • Experience with Git workflows and collaborative development on GitHub across multiple repositories

  • Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, including GitHub Actions

  • Experience working with containerized environments such as Docker and/or Kubernetes

  • Understanding of algorithmic time and space complexity for writing performant code

  • Hands-on experience with relational databases and file storage solutions

  • Experience with data acquisition from databases, flat files, web sources, and APIs

  • Familiarity with web scraping tools such as Beautiful Soup

  • Experience building batch ETL/ELT data pipelines

  • Working knowledge of AWS and cloud computing fundamentals

  • Demonstrated interest in blockchain technology and digital assets

  • Strong technical writing skills with the ability to document complex pipelines for non-technical stakeholders

  • Basic understanding of handling sensitive data and PII

Not required, but may prove beneficial:

  • Advanced web scraping with Selenium or Playwright

  • Cloud infrastructure deployment via the AWS console or Terraform (IaC), including services such as S3, RDS, ECS, ECR, and Lambda

  • Hands-on experience creating crypto wallets and executing transactions across blockchain platforms

  • Smart contract development and deployment

  • Knowledge of clustering algorithms and transaction pattern analysis

  • Experience building, testing, and training machine learning models

  • Familiarity with NLP techniques and tooling

  • Neo4j Graph database experience 

  • Exposure to additional languages and query tools such as GraphQL, Java, Solidity, Vyper, Bitcoin Script, Cypher, or Splunk SPL

Terms:

Timeline: 10 weeks (flexible on dates)

Compensation: $6,000

Application Deadline: Resumes accepted until May 15, 2026.

Optionally send cover letter and resume to nicholas.carnevale@inca.digital