Software Engineering Intern; Full-Stack — Software Runs Protein Brewery

We’re building the protein breweries of the future. Our process is up to 5,000× more land-efficient than animal or plant protein. In the coming years, we’ll run our first commercial facilities producing thousands of tonnes of protein.

This internship is about the software those facilities run on. Not a website about the factory — the system the factory is operated from.

Brew Base is our in-house operating system. Every fermentation we run, every harvest, every food product we develop is planned, recorded, and analysed in it. When a fermentation scientist wants to know what happened in tank 3 at 4am, Brew Base is what they open.

It exists because nothing off the shelf does this. SCADA systems watch equipment. LIMS tools track samples. Neither understands a fermentation — that a run has phases, that a protocol has defaults a tank can override, that the broth in that tank becomes a powder that becomes a product, and that you need to follow that thread all the way through.

Most companies in our position give up and use spreadsheets.

Finding out what needs to be built is the start of the job: sitting with the scientists who run our fermentations, harvests and assays, and working out what they’re actually doing. That’s harder than it sounds. People will describe the process they think they follow, and the spreadsheet they actually use has ten exceptions in it that nobody mentions until you’ve shipped without them.

You work out the real answer, then you build it. Then you find out which parts you still got wrong, because the people using it are in the same building and they will tell you.

That’s the loop, and it’s why this internship is worth doing. Most interns ship into a void. You’ll ship at 11 and watch someone use it at 14.

The last person to do this internship built our Food Application module. They arrived, sat down with the food scientists, and built the whole thing: recipe formulation where a finished recipe can be promoted into an ingredient for the next one, with nutrient values rolling up automatically; blinded sensory panels that external tasters join by link; EU and US regulatory nutrition labels generated straight from the formulation.

It’s one of Brew Base’s three top-level modules, the food team uses it every day, and they stopped opening Excel. That’s the scale of what an internship here can be.

One central project, yours end to end. See three ideas below: which one you take depends on where you’re strongest and what the plant needs when you arrive, and we’ll work that out with you.

Build the analytics module.We run a growing array of specialised in‑house testing – HPLC, PCR, compositional assays – across both R&D and QA, and right now it lives in spreadsheets and instrument exports. You’d own the whole arc: designing the lab notebook our scientists actually work in, modelling what a test method and a specification and a result really are, building the QA workflows on top, and then going after the data at its source – pulling results off the instruments automatically instead of making someone retype them.

This stretches from schema design to UI to talking to an HPLC.

Make a running plant legible.Brew Base is fed by live hardware – sensors, pumps, scales, streaming continuously from vessels in the building. Turning that firehose into something a human can read at a glance: control-room views, process flow mimics, trend and anomaly detection, alerting that fires when something is actually wrong and stays quiet when it isn’t. The hard parts are information density and real-time data at volume.

Close the mass balance.Every gram that goes into a harvest should come out of it, and when the numbers don’t add up, someone needs to know where. You’d work on the engine that models a harvest as a conservation problem and solves it, and on the flow-graph interface that points a scientist at the one measurement that’s missing or wrong.

Alongside whichever you take, you’ll get your hands on everything else – Brew Base is one system, and its parts touch.

The bar is the same whichever you take: it’s done when someone would notice if it went down. Not a demo, not a…