The Ethereum Foundation has opened applications for the 2026 Internship Program: a full-time, paid opportunity to work directly with teams advancing the Ethereum protocol and ecosystem.
Interns will join EF teams for 12 weeks over the summer, contributing to active R&D and ecosystem-focused projects across a wide range of focus areas. The internship is open to candidates from around the world and can be completed remotely or from EF offices. A summer meetup will bring the cohort together to connect in person.
The goal
Ethereum continues to evolve; every upgrade, research initiative, and experiment depends on people willing to dive into complex problems and help build what comes next. The internship is designed to give emerging engineers and researchers a practical path to this work. Interns contribute to real-world projects under the guidance of experienced mentors within Ethereum’s open and collaborative environment.
Who should apply
The program is aimed at university students or recent graduates who are passionate about Ethereum, open source contributions and decentralized technologies. High signal candidates will already have some understanding of Ethereum at a technical level and will want to deepen this understanding through applied work. Candidates must be autonomous and comfortable exploring unfamiliar systems.
Application process
Applications are open until December 1, 2025. Shortlisted candidates will then be invited for interviews over the next two months, with final selections announced in early February. The internship lasts approximately 12 weeks during the summer, with flexible start and end dates to match academic calendars.
Internship Roles 2026
FE teams are looking for interns. Each role is connected to an EF team or initiative with active projects. Applicants should view the full listings on the EF job site for full details on scope, preferred skills and sample tasks.
Cryptography research
EF’s cryptography research team designs and analyzes cryptographic primitives critical to Ethereum’s roadmap, advises protocol and client teams on security choices, and publishes peer-reviewed results that keep Ethereum at the forefront of cryptography research.
👉 Apply
DevOps
EthPandaOps helps ensure a well-tested, coordinated, and secure fork on Ethereum. They achieve these goals through custom tools, deployment scripts, and data collection pipelines. Additionally, EthPandaOps aims to enable the community to reuse tools to meet their own needs, thereby reducing overall effort while ensuring minimum standards.
👉 Apply
Funding coordination
The Strategic Financing Coordination Team helps grantees of EF and other critical public goods projects secure co-financing from ecosystem grants, government programs, philanthropic organizations, and selected business partners.
👉 Apply
Geth (Go-Ethereum)
The go-ethereum team is building Geth, an Ethereum execution layer client written in Go. Within the EF, they perform research and development on the Ethereum protocol. As lead developers, they shape the protocol and judge external contributions.
👉 Apply
P2P network
The P2P Networking team is today tackling a proven bottleneck in Ethereum: the network layer. They are working on two fronts: improving the current stack to meet Ethereum’s near- and mid-term ambitions, while leading radical first-principles thinking to rethink the network layer from the ground up for long-term scalability and growth. They collaborate closely with client implementers, researchers, and libp2p maintainers across the ecosystem.
👉 Apply
Consensus on protocol
The Protocol Consensus team’s mission is to bridge the gap between the guarantees provided by Ethereum’s consensus protocol today and those needed to fully support the network’s long-term values ​​and goals. To achieve this goal, they focus on activities such as protocol design, theoretical analysis, writing specifications, engaging academia, and collaborating with the broader ecosystem to ensure ideas can be put into practice.
👉 Apply
Protocol prototyping
The Protocol Prototyping team builds end-to-end implementations of new ideas for Ethereum’s core protocol. By turning concepts into working prototypes, the team explores how potential upgrades behave in practice, helping the community move beyond theory and speculation. Their work tests hypotheses, quantifies trade-offs, and reveals risks that may not be apparent from research alone.
👉 Apply
Protocol security
The Protocol Security Research Team protects the integrity of Ethereum. Through coordination, meticulous code reviews, advanced tool development, and real-world simulations, the team focuses on securing the network and its critical components. Their hands-on approach includes bug bounty program management, continuous network monitoring, and collaboration with customer teams.
👉 Apply
Snarkification of the protocol
Protocol Snarkification is dedicated to the snarkification of the Ethereum protocol, alongside the Cryptography and zkEVM teams. The team focuses particularly on formal verification applied to cryptographic protocols and their implementations.
👉 Apply
Protocol Specifications and Testing
The Ethereum Execution Layer Specification and Testing (STEEL) team primarily consists of two projects: Ethereum Execution Layer Specification (EELS) and Ethereum Execution Specification Tests (EEST).
- The EELS project is responsible for the main Ethereum protocol reference specification written in Python, which aims to replace the Yellow Paper specification and be a crucial aid to the EIP process to provide a prototyping framework for new updates.
- The EEST project is responsible for benchmark testing of the Ethereum protocol, used by all clients to detect consensus issues during new implementations and hard-fork regressions.
The team also supports testing efforts for consensus specifications, maintaining and improving the tools, frameworks, documentation, and guidance needed to facilitate test consumption by client developers.
👉 Apply
Robust incentive group
The Robust Incentives Group (RIG) is a research team dedicated to studying the Ethereum protocol through the lens of mechanism design. Their work maps all the ways incentives directly or indirectly affect Ethereum participants. Where possible, the team proposes mechanisms to achieve incentive compatibility and system optimality.
👉 Apply
zkEVM
Integrating zkEVMs into Ethereum Layer 1 is a multi-faceted effort. The zkEVM team’s work is organized into three main work streams: real-time proof, client and protocol integration, economic incentives, and security.
👉 Apply
A path to the protocol layer
The EF Internship Program provides an entry point into protocol-level work. This is an opportunity to contribute meaningfully while gaining experience, mentorship, and context on how Ethereum is maintained and advanced.
If you’re ready to spend your summer building Ethereum, explore open positions and apply now at:
👉 jobs.lever.co/ethereumfoundation
